The Ministry of Education (MOE) held a press conference on July 14 to highlight recent expansion and rapid uptake of Smart Education of China (SEC), an online portal for educational resources and tools. Xu Mei, director of the Information Office and spokesperson for MOE, moderated the event.  

SEC offers resources in four major areas: primary and secondary education, vocational education, higher education, and employment services for college graduates. It also includes three themed sections: COVID-19 control, mental health, and the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Xu introduced the latest upgrades to the portal, including establishment of sub-portals for Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and six other provinces, launching a login function for unified user ID authentication across the four major service areas, and adding new resources to the existing sections.

According to Xu, the portal has generated more than 430 million views since its launch on March 29.

The primary and secondary education component comprises 34,000 web pages, more than tripling since its launch, and has racked up an average of 28 million daily views, greatly contributing to undisrupted learning despite school closures during new outbreaks of COVID-19 in the first half of 2022.

The vocational education component now has 1,189 datasets, with 13 new additions; a total of 6,628 text-based courses, with 192 newly added; and 2,222 video-based courses, with 213 recent additions.

The higher education component has also added 850 MOOC courses to 27,000 existing ones. These courses now serve users from 143 countries and territories across the world.

The fourth component, the employment service platform, has published more than 11 million job postings, with 7 million recent additions. Altogether, it has pushed more than 20 million postings to its users. The number of users who are 2022 graduates has increased to almost 5.2 million from 3 million less than four months ago.