Transformation From RTVUs to Open Universities in China: Current State and Challenges

Open and distance education has been playing an important role in China’s development of higher education and lifelong learning. In 2012, the Chinese government approved six large-scale radio and television universities (RTVUs) to become open universities (OUs), including the Open University of China (OUC), Beijing Open University (BJOU), Shanghai Open University (SHOU), Guangdong Open University (GDOU), Jiangsu Open University (JSOU), and Yunnan Open University (YNOU). The purpose of this study is to provide a descriptive analysis of the transition from RVTUs to OUs, and the current state and challenges of open universities in China after five years’ reform. Five topics are explored in this paper, including: the new positioning of open universities in China’s vast and differentiated higher education system; award bearing and non-award bearing program offerings; implementation of the online teaching and learning modes; the use of Open Education Resources (OER) and online mini-courses; and the development and use of a credit bank system. A summary of these topics follows a discussion of four issues of open university reform, including key performance indicators (KPIs) for open universities, cohesion and resource sharing between the national and provincial open universities, quality assurance for award bearing programs, and planning to transform China’s existing 39 provincial RTVUs into OUs. It is expected that the results of this study would contribute to knowledge about institutional differentiation in the world’s largest higher education system, and on the merits of open and distance education in the human resource development in China. This paper may also provide insight for other countries that are engaged in institutional differentiation of higher education systems punctuated by the essential role of open universities in such planning and implementation.


Article abstract
Open and distance education has been playing an important role in China's development of higher education and lifelong learning. In 2012, the Chinese government approved six large-scale radio and television universities (RTVUs) to become open universities (OUs), including the Open University of China (OUC), Beijing Open University (BJOU), Shanghai Open University (SHOU), Guangdong Open University (GDOU), Jiangsu Open University (JSOU), and Yunnan Open University (YNOU). The purpose of this study is to provide a descriptive analysis of the transition from RVTUs to OUs, and the current state and challenges of open universities in China after five years' reform. Five topics are explored in this paper, including: the new positioning of open universities in China's vast and differentiated higher education system; award bearing and non-award bearing program offerings; implementation of the online teaching and learning modes; the use of Open Education Resources (OER) and online mini-courses; and the development and use of a credit bank system. A summary of these topics follows a discussion of four issues of open university reform, including key performance indicators (KPIs) for open universities, cohesion and resource sharing between the national and provincial open universities, quality assurance for award bearing programs, and planning to transform China's existing 39 provincial RTVUs into OUs. It is expected that the results of this study would contribute to knowledge about institutional differentiation in the world's largest higher education system, and on the merits of open and distance education in the human resource development in China. This paper may also provide insight for other countries that are engaged in institutional differentiation of higher education systems punctuated by the essential role of open universities in such planning and implementation.

Introduction
Open and distance education (ODE) has been an essential part of the lifelong education system in China.
An ever-changing information and communication technology infrastructure and continuous social and economic development have enabled widespread uptake of ODE in China. The open and distance education institutions in China started as correspondence colleges housed in conventional universities in the 1950s and developed into radio universities (RUs) and television universities (TVUs) in the 1960s. After the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, a national strategy resulted in the opening of radio and television universities (RTVUs) across the country. Other reforms took place in the 1990s, particularly with the push to create a mass system of higher education, to create a modern distance education system in China, and to increasingly blur the lines between conventional and distance education programs. The most recent reform was in 2012 when a handful of RTVUs, including the Central RTVU in Beijing, were transformed into Open Universities (OUs) within the context of promoting of learning society in the 21 st century in China (Hao, 2017).
In the early 1960s, with the development of Radio and TV as well as the social demand for the higher education, RUs and TVUs were established in several central cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Changchun, and Harbin. For example, in Harbin, in 1961, the Harbin Municipal Committee decided to set up Harbin Broadcasting Normal University and Harbin TV University and for meeting the huge demand of learning. The teachers from the conventional universities in Harbin carried out teaching by broadcasting or recording at Harbin TV and Broadcasting Station. There were almost 10,000 students enrolled in the first year and many of them were factory workers, government officers, school teachers, and cadres who had graduated from high school (Zhang, 1960). However, the RUs and TVUs were suspended during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976 (Ge, 2008). After the Cultural Revolution, the national economy, education, science, and technology sectors were in need of technical expertise. As such the workforce needed to be revitalized and advanced training at scale was deemed essential. In 1976, approximately 12 of 10,000 people possessed a higher education qualification, ranking as the ninth lowest in the world (Yang, 2011). In 1978, after meeting with the formal British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, who championed the successes of the UK Open University, the Chinese Vice Premier, Deng Xiaoping, decided to use radio and TV education to address the huge demand of higher education for the whole country and, under this context, the radio and television universities were opened (Ge, 2012). In 1979, the Central Radio & Television University (CRTVU) and 28 provincial radio and television universities were established (Wei, 2015). As a result, a comprehensive open and distance education system, the RTVU system, was organized at the central, provincial, urban, and rural levels.
Hereafter, the development of RTVUs could be summarized into three stages. From 1979 to 1989, RTVUs carried out higher education for employees, school teachers, and urban youth through radio and television.
Many of them could not get access to the higher education system during the 10-year Cultural Revolution.
At this stage, along with the Chinese Reform and Opening-up Policy, and the acceleration of expansion of big cities, some cities, such as Ningbo City in Zhejiang Province, had also established radio and television universities. From 1990 to 1998, RTVUs provided different types of education involving adult education, general college education, and continuing education, through radio and television programs, video, and computer mediated learning. By 1998, the RTVU system was assembled into one national CRTVU and 44 provincial radio and television universities (Ge, 2012). From 1999 to 2010, RTVUs complemented existing 3 learning options with online learning offered in various programs at different levels. At this stage, the enrollment and the scale of RTVUs expanded rapidly, which was increased from 0.95 million to 2.95 million, making the RTVU system one of the largest "universities" in the world (CRTVU, 2010). Special education programs were also provided for target groups including farmers, disabled people, military officers, and minority groups. In 2010, as a nationwide management system, the RTVU system had one CRTVU, 44 provincial radio and television universities, over 1,000 city-level colleges, and 3,000 countylevel learning centers (Li, 2014).
In 2010, the State Council of China (2010a) issued the Outline of China's National Plan for Medium andLong-term Education Reform andDevelopment (2010-2020). The plan consists of a preamble, four sections, and implementation measures. It proposed the strategic goal of "realizing basic educational modernization, building a learning society, and turning China into a country with rich human resources" (p. 14) by 2020. In order to propel "building a flexible, open system for lifelong education" (p. 15), the

Procedures
There were three steps in this study.

Results
The major results of this study could be classified into five aspects: (1) new position of open universities in China's system of higher education, (2) award bearing and non-award bearing program offering, (3) online teaching and learning mode, (4) OER and mini-courses, and (5) a credit bank system.

New Position of Open Universities in the Ecology of Higher Education in China
RTVUs were deemed as the beneficial complement of conventional universities (Chen et al., 2013). universities should have staggered development, which means that there are two different types of universities in the Chinese higher education system, and that they need to accept and keep the differentiation. They hold many differences, such as mission, position, target group, and teaching and learning mode in Chinese higher education system, which form a complementary system and provide lifelong learning opportunities for all (Zhang, 2011). Table 2 gives some examples of their differences.

Award Bearing and Non-Award Bearing Program Offering
Award bearing program offering. Some scholars (Chen, Zheng, & Yin, 2013;Hao, 2012;Wang, 2016) pointed out that autonomy should be one of the characteristics of universities in China, but this has been a challenge to the RTVUs for several decades.
An important difference between the RTVUs and the OUs is the right to award degrees. During the period of the RTVUs, the CRTVU cooperated with conventional universities to award bachelor degree. English     Table 5).

Online Teaching and Learning Mode
Transformation of teaching and learning from radio, television, and multimedia to Internet-based has been a significant change for the RTVUs to become OUs. The Ministry of Education (2012g) promulgated the

Development Plan for the Ten Years of ICT in Education
, marking the open universities as "a test field, a demonstration area and one of the leaders in the development of ICT in education in China" (Hao, 2017, p. 5). It is highly related to the demand and context of the ubiquity of Internet use in China, which stands at nearly 800 million users (CNNIC, 2018). Chinese President Jinping Xi, in acknowledging this growth, asserted that leveraging the Internet to advance learning will be a driving force for economic growth (Hua, 2016). According to the plan: The open universities are the main force for building public service platforms for continuing education, providing services to the whole society, building a convenient, flexible and personalized

OER and Mini-Courses
The 10 developed the Shanghai Learning Network, offering more than 28,000 online courses with 3 million registered users. The OER developed by the six OUs are summarized in Table 6.

Credit Bank Systems
The establishment of qualifications frameworks (QF) for lifelong learning has been popularized worldwide (Zhang, 2014). They have been used for the articulation and communication among conventional education, vocational education, continuing education, and corporate training for mutual recognition of learning credits. In 2010, The State Council (2010b) started a pilot project of establishing QF and a "credit bank" system in China, and decided to include the open universities in the project. One of the reasons is that promoting formal, non-formal, and informal education is an essential feature of open universities, which differ from RTVUs and conventional universities (Hao, 2017).
In • Its formation of a system of education where the learning model and curriculum are based on joint construction and sharing, cross-industry and cross-regional university, catering to rural and urban as well as overseas students.
• Its cooperation with other colleges and universities, vocational schools and social education institutions to establish a National Digital Learning Resources Centre.
• Its focus on the quality of learner development opening online learning spaces for tens of thousands of teachers and millions of students, with customized services for different group of people.
• Its ongoing formation of a "credit bank" system to promote the accreditation, accumulation and transfer of formal and informal learning outcomes.
• The initial formation of a non-degree education model that meets people's diverse and personalized requirements for lifelong learning.

Problems and Challenges
Notwithstanding the achievements above, the reform and development of open universities have also been facing problems and challenges in relation to the following four aspects.
Over-reliance on government policy. Both RTVUs and OUs are established by the Chinese government for solving the problem of economic and social development of the country during a specific period. On the one hand, it benefits from the support of government policy. On the other hand, it has indirectly caused policy reliance without the autonomy that conventional universities enjoy, and caused reform practices to be constrained. For example, the policy of establishing open universities and the 1+5 pilot transformation from RTVUs into OUs has greatly promoted the development of the CRTVU, and 13 especially the five local RTVUs. As Hao (2017) said, because of this policy, the local governments gave a lot of support to them, such as the increase of funding, infrastructure, and personnel. Compared with them, the 39 RTVUs outside of the pilot have much less support.
Contradiction between unification and diversification. The RTVUs uses a national unified operation model. From the central to the local government, a five-level operation system is adopted, including unified enrollment, unified discipline, unified curriculum, unified teaching materials, and uniform assessment (Ge, 2012 (Wang, 2017). Moreover, the issues of stakeholder cooperation, open and flexible platform, recognition of learning outcomes, and quality assurance may involve breakthroughs and innovations in the existing education system and mechanisms (Cui, 2018a).

Growing competitiveness in online education market.
The open and distance learning institutions in China are now experiencing an unprecedented prosperous period while the market is increasingly competitive, which covers all education levels, attracts public and private sectors, and provides various scopes of services (Gaba & Li, 2015). According to ResearchInChina (2017) 14 New Issues  universities, and to build consensus, mutual benefits, and win-win results, is one of the key issues for the next step.
Quality assurance for awarding bearing programs. The Minister of MOE emphasizes that after the 19th CPC National Congress, the primary focus of higher education in China is to achieve high quality development (Sun, 2017 (Yang, 2014). Although the open universities have the right to independently award bachelor degrees, there is a considerable quality gap between open universities and top conventional universities in terms of faculty, subjects, and teaching quality (Hao, 2012).

Transforming the Remaining 39 Provincial RTVUs to OUs
For realizing the goal of "the open university system with Chinese characteristics in 2020" (MOE, 2016, p. 4), it is essential to explore the development of piloted open universities and remaining RTVUs. The RTVU has been a holistic system, involving one CRTVU, 44 provincial RTVUs, over 1,000 city-level colleges, and more than 3,000 county-level learning centers. Nowadays, the OUs are still regarded as a system, namely the "open university system with Chinese characteristics," operating under the MOE. However, after transforming six RTVUs to OUs in 2012, the MOE has not yet provided the explicit schedule and timeline for the transformation of the remaining 39 provincial RTVUs to OUs.

Implementations
Referring to the result of discussion above, some for the transformation of 39 RTVUs to OUs. Third, it is necessary to accelerate the process of building QF and credit transfer systems at the national level. Without unified national QF levels and standards, it will be difficult to achieve mutual recognition and credit transfer for all types of qualifications among different areas and levels (Zhang, 2014). Finally, the educational reform should be based on outcomes of research and practice. Great efforts should be made to conduct scientific research on open universities. It is necessary to do in-depth comparative studies, field studies, and applied studies focusing on several key research topics in open and distance education, such as inclusive education, evaluation, and quality assurance, the application of ICTs in education, and the curriculum design, as well as new issues on Internet+ education, leadership and innovation, OER and MOOCs, mobile learning, big data, and learning analytics (Zhang, 2017