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Education drives human civilization progress and social development. From the ancient Chinese system of parallel official and private education to the modern systems of compulsory education and higher education, the reforms in education reflect the development of social systems and the progress of the times. General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized in his congratulatory letter to the first opening ceremony of the Tsinghua University's Schwarzman College, "Education inherits the past, cultivates the present, and creates the future, and is an important force driving the progress of human civilization."

The digital society is advancing rapidly, profoundly changing human production, life, and learning, and profoundly affecting the global competitive landscape evolution. The rise of AI technologies represented by large language models is an all-encompassing technological revolution that will trigger profound changes in the education industry. The breakthrough development of AI technology will redefine learning objectives and talent competitiveness.

Technological innovation "builds upon" education development

General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized, "We are closer to realizing the grand goal of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation than at any time in history, and more eager for talents than at any time in history." As one of the "leaders" in the domestic education technology industry, the Alibaba Group has always insisted on using educational technology to assist education modernization, considered cultivating modern talents as its own responsibility, persisted in exerting unique advantages in technology, products, and content innovation fields, and contributed to the all-round digital transformation of full-time schools and other participating parties, in order to contribute to building a learning society for all.

In August 2022, Alibaba upgraded its corporate mission to "Love and technology promote lifelong growth," aiming to focus on doing a good job in its main education business, actively exploring new consumer, service, and new geographical areas. The Alibaba Group takes service for youth learning as its starting point, actively connects with the latest development and application of digital technology, and transforms products from serving a single group to serving all learners, and from developing its own technology system to opening a technology platform. At present, Alibaba also faces new challenges and development opportunities. On the one hand, it needs to continuously explore new directions and stabilize its survival foundation; on the other hand, it needs to make efforts to achieve "rebirth" and create more socially valuable services and products, closely follow the development of technology, seize industry opportunities, and emphasize talent development focusing on national strategic needs.

Alibaba uses technological means to provide large-scale, low-priced, and high-quality teaching services to implement the promotion of educational fairness and universal access. At the beginning of 2020, after the global outbreak of the epidemic, Alibaba established a special fund of 100 million yuan for fighting the epidemic, used to provide live broadcast teaching systems for primary and secondary schools across the country and offline training institutions for free, and provided live broadcast classes for primary and secondary school students across the country for free, helping children across the country to "stop studying without stopping". According to statistics during the peak of the online classroom, the number of students watching live classes exceeded 60 million person-times daily.

At the same time, Alibaba actively collaborates with public welfare organizations, educational practitioners, and others to improve the education situation in resource-scarce areas, sink high-quality education resources from developed regions through technology, form a long-term mechanism for education improvement, and gradually transition from "blood transfusion" to "hematopoiesis," promoting fair and sustainable development in education. Use technological innovation to change production methods and cost structures and make high-quality learning resources benefit more users.

Since 2016, Alibaba has been committed to "promoting educational progress through technology," giving full play to its own resources and technological advantages as an education and technology enterprise, sharing high-quality educational resources with educationally underdeveloped areas, upgrading long-distance support teaching on the Internet, cooperating to launch the "Chunya Online" educational public welfare platform, and collaborating to launch the "Hands-on the Mountains" public welfare foundation, and co-operating with local governments to carry out education informatization projects, promoting local education development by improving education informatization, and realizing an "Internet plus Education" model to promote balanced development in education.

In addition, aiming at remote border areas, the Alibaba Public Welfare Foundation initiated the "Dual-Teacher Classroom" project in 2018. By building an Internet public welfare education platform and combining it with training teachers in underprivileged areas on platform usage, the Alibaba Public Welfare Foundation effectively delivers high-quality educational resources to remote areas and deeply integrates them into the teaching and learning activities of teachers and students, and solves the problem of the serious reliance on practical teaching by teachers for the improvement of education quality in remote areas. In this process, the excellent frontline teachers of Alibaba empower local teachers and students, striving to cultivate "seed teachers" and form a long-term teaching mechanism of online teaching and research combined with offline guided tutoring.

Dual-teacher AI classroom brings Alibaba's AI technology and offline classrooms into high-quality integration

The "Dual-Teacher Classroom" breaks through traditional teaching methods, splitting the education process into "online teachers responsible for imparting knowledge and guiding teachings + teaching research," and "offline teachers responsible for answering questions, providing personalized tutoring," not only making full use of existing educational resources in local schools, achieving the sharing of high-quality educational resources, but also transmitting a more advanced, scientific, and convenient education model to various counties and places, allowing more children to benefit from high-quality educational resources in county towns and even the capital Beijing.

As of now, Alibaba has carried out educational assistance projects in Jimunai, Xinjiang, Fuping, Shaanxi, Wangmo, Guizhou, and Xiongxian, Hebei, aiming to bring the dual-teacher classroom to these areas and offering high-quality education to more children.

Alibaba has completed the transition from independently creating courses, platforms, to jointly creating an educational ecosystem with the industry, and then to mobilizing social forces and international outcome transformation.

In June 2018, Alibaba Public Welfare Foundation launched the "Starting Point Plan." In response to the problem of "difficult lesson plans and tiring preparation" faced by preschool teachers in poor areas, it designed a set of 7 pre-school skills courses and teaching materials for kindergartens in the Bijie City, Guizhou, and sent volunteers to provide training for local teachers offline to help them improve teaching. In addition, Alibaba, in collaboration with the China Development Research Fund, Beijing Normal University, Global Silicon Valley Investment Company (GSV), and other institutions, jointly organized the GES (Global Education Summit) Future Education Conference around the theme of "Technological Innovation Promotes Educational Progress" and jointly explored global trends in the development of the education industry.

Alibaba established the "AI Lab" in 2017; in 2019, the Ministry of Science and Technology approved the construction of the "Wise Education National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Open Innovation Platform" based on Alibaba, which officially launched the AI Cloud Classroom in May 2023. At present, Alibaba's AI Mandarin teaching system has covered 252 teaching points, 72 primary schools, more than 80,000 students, and more than 2,000 teachers in Zhaocountry, Liangshan, Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. In May 2023, Alibaba announced the release of its self-developed mathematical AI large model MathGPT for global math enthusiasts, learners, and research institutions, actively promoting the exploration and evolution of AI technology in professional fields.

Education technology companies actively "go global"

"Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved in the "United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development." Under this goal, it is expected that by 2030, only one-sixth of the countries will be able to provide universal access to high-quality education, and 84 million children and adolescents will still be out of school. Traditional education faces urgent problems of uneven resource distribution and unbalanced regional development.

Technology is an important carrier of educational opportunities and innovation. It can reduce the threshold of education, connect various educational resources, and provide new educational opportunities while empowering traditional education. The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed the globalization of educational technology, giving rise to emerging education companies such as Coursera, Khan Academy, and BYJU's. The impact of AI on the education industry contains enormous commercial potential. Chinese education technology companies, after years of accumulating rich operational experience and technical advantages, have now become international leaders. Actively promoting internationalization is the mission and development direction of Chinese education technology companies in the era.

General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized, "We will take a more open attitude to strengthen international scientific and technological exchanges, actively participate in the global innovation network, jointly promote basic research, promote the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, and cultivate new economic growth drivers." Actively embracing the international market also conforms to the guidance of the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology encouraging technology companies to "go global" and serve the national "Belt and Road Initiative." Alibaba is making efforts to cultivate independent innovation capabilities and international competitiveness, and is committed to becoming a multinational company and a global brand with independent intellectual property rights, strength, and contributing Chinese wisdom to the cause of global education through high-quality content and advanced technology.

After continuous exploration, Alibaba has achieved a series of remarkable results, for example, by engaging in international business through overseas campuses and innovative product development, participating in various ways to promote international cooperation in science and education; opening up new fields of quality education and a new mode of Chinese language education, and leading the application of "going global," teaching Chinese language and culture to overseas Chinese and foreign students; actively organizing global academic and technological exchanges to share successful Chinese experiences, carry out brand culture and technology output. In the future, Alibaba will continue to lead the company to achieve its "going global" goals, contribute educational resources to the world, and accelerate the balanced development of education internationally.

This article was published in the 5th issue of China Internet News 2023

"China Netcom" The directory of 5th issue 2023: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/j0San3aWhXh8VTpwYGOavg