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With schools in China switching to online lessons due to the coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of millions of students and teachers have flocked to online education platforms. The emergency measures put in place for these extraordinary times have transformed how schools teach.
By Xu Shenglan, Li Li
The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020 pressed the pause button on the rapid and sustained advancements that China’s been making in socioeconomic development. It’s also had a dramatic impact on education: on February 12, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly announced that schools were suspended, but that crucially, learning wasn’t.
In these unique circumstances, implementing large-scale online education for hundreds of millions of students nationwide was an unprecedented move. We’ve witnessed one of the world's largest upgrade projects to China’s information infrastructure, involving training for teachers and students and one of the biggest trials of online education the world has ever seen.