Edubeacon

Last year I visited China for a brief but enlightening 9 days.  It was long enough for me to develop a whole new understanding of the country, it’s people and where they see themselves in relation to the rest of the world.  I was therefore very interested to read the article Documenting China’s ed-tech explosion  posted today by George Siemens. 

“In pure bulk, the numbers behind China’s expansion are startling. Between 1999, shortly after the country’s leaders decided to focus on expanding access to and improving the quality of higher education as tools to propel the former Third World economy into the leading ranks of the world’s powers, and 2005, the number of undergraduate and graduate students earning degrees from China’s colleges and universities quadrupled, rising to 3.1 million from 830,000. Enrollments grew even faster over that period, with the number of new entering students growing to nearly 5 million in 2005.” 

Have a read.  The numbers will stagger you and I can verify that, as learners, the Chinese have a real passion to get ahead within their own country.