DIGITAL RESOURCE TRENDS IN EDUCATION IN ETHNIC AREAS OF CHINA

There are 56 ethnics in China who are living in each province. In general, they are living in the south or in the west of China which are underdeveloped economically. The economic imbalance has resulted in a huge gap in education between the ethnic areas and the other areas. Through literature review we know that some problems exist in the ethnic areas’ education, which includes a disadvantage in workplace position, with resulting lack of security, a low level of compulsory education, insufficient qualified teachers, weak bilingual education, etc. We think that if they had sufficient and high quality digital education resources, then most of the problems would be resolved or mitigated. Though there are huge digital education resources in The Public Service Platform of National Education Resources, most of the digital resources were developed with mandarin language and only few of them used ethic language.

We mainly adopted in this research methods in ethnography, observation, interview. At the beginning of this research, we visited some primary and secondary schools in ethnic areas (Yi nationality) of the Leshan municipality, Sichuan province to investigation their digital education resources, to assess the requirements. Then we invited some Yi nationality teachers to join our research-development project to develop some bilingual (mandarin language and Yi nationality language) learning resources. We uploaded the developed learning resources on a local platform of education resources and recommended it to the teachers of Yi nationality in Leshan. After the trial of one semester, we investigated and evaluated the education modernization according to the index of education modernization.

Comparing the index of pre-trial on education modernization results with the post-trial results, we found there were some improvements in some of the grade I indices, for example, the digital resources, the educational website, distance education, application system, ICT education. We found that there were significant improvements in digital resources, modern distance education, and ICT education.

In ethnic areas, we tried to explore bilingual digital education resources and sharing of quality education resources. A public service platform of high-quality bilingual education resources were established to cover many ethnic areas and to reach as many teachers and students as possible. We attempted to reduce the gap of digital education compared to non-ethnic areas. A mechanism for sharing quality education resources were established in ethnic areas, which were application-oriented, network-based, research-supported, and assessment-enhanced.