Professional Training through Online Education
Posted on October 15, 2009 by Li Feng
Recently, a journal article in the latest issue of Distance Education in China, a journal supervised by the Ministry of Education, caught my eyes. According to the excerpt of the article (in Chinese), which can be accessed here, professional training through online education is rapidly on the rise in China with the popularization of the internet and the increasing demand for professional development. Although the market share of online professional training is currently much smaller than that of face to face training, it is without question showing great potential and a trend of increase. Currently the scale of the market is about RMB 0.8 to 1 billion, or $ 170 million. It is estimated that, after 3 to 5 years of development, it may grow to around RMB 3 billion, or $ 5 billion.
Online education provides solutions to the limitations of time and place in adult learning. Most students of professional training are full-time employees who cannot afford a huge amount of time to study. Online education provides a great deal of flexibility, which fits well with the characteristics of adult learners regardless of what country in which they reside.
In China, there are mainly two types of professional training: certification training and knowledge/skill-oriented training. In the former, students obtain professional certification of the industry whereas in the latter, students aim to increase their knowledge base or enhancing their profession-related skills. At the moment, certification training stands as the mainstream in the market. Most people are driven by extrinsic need, rather than intrinsic interest, to take certification training in order to obtain professional certificates that are recognized in the industry. Comparatively speaking, knowledge/skill-oriented training takes a much smaller proportion of the market, but it’s developing fast as well.
In terms of the areas of professional training, various industries see different rates of development, due to various factors such as the size of the industry, the demand for training, the difficulty of the certification test, and so on. Among all areas, foreign languages and IT are the most popular. Other popular areas include accounting, e-commerce, and others.
In addition, with the development of online education, more attention has been gradually given to the quality of learning and instruction. According to the article, when online education first emerged, people were only excited about the “online” part of it, i.e. taking advantage of the network. Gradually, the attention has shifted to the “education” part, i.e. improving the effectiveness of learning and teaching. Efforts have been made to explore blended learning that integrates online learning with face to face learning to optimize the learning results. The online component and the face to face component can be combined well and complement each other well.
This article draws a nice picture for UMassOnline in providing quality online professional training for the growing market. UMassOnline provides both certification training and knowledge/skill-oriented training, through both fully online and blended formats, in a wide array of disciplines. [I of course will mention that you can visit the UMassOnline website or our newly developed Chinese site: to learn more about training programs available at UMassOnline.]
Please feel free to share your comments and ideas here!
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