On April 28, the Ministry of Education held a press conference to report on the progress of “Smart Education of China” (SEC), a government-sponsored online education platform launched on March 28, 2022. The platform offers a variety of educational resources for students in primary and junior high schools, vocational schools and higher education institutions. It also contains an online campus recruitment platform. Recently, as part of SEC, three new sub-sections were launched, namely “Combating COVID-19”, “Mental Health Services” and “Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics”.

It is reported that SEC has received very positive user feedback. Its sub-section for primary and junior high school students has seen an increase of content. As of April 27, SEC had a total of 2.22 billion visits. Among them, the two sections “Features” and “After-school Service” had 370 million visits combined, helping to enrich students’ after-school activities. This section also provides effective support for online learning at the COVID-19 stricken areas. In the eight provinces impacted the most by the pandemic, the average daily visits to the platform exceeded 2 million. A mobile APP was also launched to facilitate the synergy among students, teachers and parents.

The SEC’s sub-section for tertiary education had nearly 9 million visits as of the date of the press conference, with more than 25,000 online courses. Its subscribers come from 129 countries, including China, the US, Britain, Canada and Japan.

As for the SEC’s sub-section for vocational education, there are nearly 2,000 databases for educational resources, more than 6,000 quality online courses and more than 2,000 video lessons.