The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching

Abstract

The Top Level Quality Project (jingpin kecheng, 精品课程) is a large project in Chinese higher education which uses the production of Open Educational Resources to improve the quality of undergraduate education. Widely understood in the West to be a form of OpenCourseWare inspired by MIT’s example, this thesis traces the roots of the project back to the history of Russian influence on Chinese higher education, the introduction of course evaluation systems in 1985, a string of large-scale funding projects to promote excellence in the 1990’s, and the massification of higher education from 1988 to 1998. After a detailed description of the project, the thesis suggests that university teaching is conceptualized very differently in North America and in China, drawing parallels both to the historical French and German models of the university, and to the Chinese tradition of using “models” to promote virtue and excellence.