Evaluation of and Policy Measures for the Sustainable Development of National Experimental Teaching Demonstration Centers in Chinese Universities and Colleges

The establishment of national experimental teaching demonstration centers (NETDCs) in China has played an important role in improving the experimental teaching level in universities and colleges, promoting scientific research, and cultivating innovative talents for national- and region-level innovations. However, how to promote the sustainable development of NETDCs in China is becoming a critical issue. This paper constructs a new theoretical model for evaluating the sustainable development of NETDCs in China. This model consists of 5 dimensions (i.e., environmental, structural, human, teaching, and output entropies), 11 primary indicators, and 34 secondary indicators. A multidimensional scale for evaluating the sustainable development of NETDCs was developed and validated based on 24,483 questionnaires from 895 NETDCs in China. The results show that the development level and overall level of NETDCs in China for all 11 primary indicators are uneven. Policy measures for promoting the sustainable development of NETDCs are proposed and discussed.

Are Professors Prepared to Teach?

Chinese universities hire thousands of Western professors and tutors each year. This is to encourage different outcomes for Chinese graduates in terms of entrepreneurship, leadership, and opportunity. However, students who receive instruction from American lecturers find a very different experience from other Western faculty. So, in 2020 a survey was developed to ascertain the perspectives and instructional processes western tutors brought to Chinese universities. This 3,000-professor survey would determine how much learning knowledge students graduated with prior to becoming a professor, how much development they sought once professors, and how much integration of current teaching and learning methodologies and theorists were brought to the classroom, including online classrooms. Results indicated that faculty who were trained in countries such as Australia, England, Germany, or Spain had more learning knowledge prior to teaching, as well as continuing to seek learning information once teaching classrooms, than their American counterparts.

The Level and Specifics of Intercultural Sensitivity of the Russian Students Attending Chinese Universities

Studies on intercultural sensitivity as an affective aspect of intercultural competence have been gaining increasing attention in today’s globalized world where representatives of different countries and cultural groups are supposed to function effectively and supportively in various spheres of life. This paper has reported some of the research results indicating the level and specifics of intercultural sensitivity of the Russian students attending Chinese universities. Building students’ intercultural sensitivity is an essential aspect of the Chinese language and culture teaching experience. Practical recommendations have been provided for increasing the students’ level of intercultural sensitivity in order to reduce stress and avoid conflict situations in multinational educational organizations.

Directions of higher library education modernization in China

The purpose of the article is to explore the experience and to identify the best practices for modernizing the content and organizational structure of multilevel training of librarians in China. The methodology. The study has used a systematic approach, which allowed to consider all components of the Chinese higher education in the specialties “Library, Archive and Information Science”, to establish the continuity of educational levels of librarians, to find out the factors determining the training system’s modernization. There was carried out comparative and content analysis of the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral higher education levels educational programs, implemented by Chinese universities in the specialty “Library Science”, “Information Management and Information Systems”. This allowed to determine the general and the specifics of the Information Field Science training in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), to establish interdisciplinarity educational components, to substantiate the objective strengthening of the information component in the content of higher education in library science. The results. The article has looked into the content and structure of 227 different levels educational programs (EP) of the information specialists training, with 41% of them being the Bachelor’s level EP, 49% — Master’s, and 9% — Educational-Scientific Programs (ESP) for the Doctor of Management degree (an equivalent to the Doctor of Philosophy) in Information Sciences, provided in 108 universities in China. There were clarified the EP peculiarities: about 40% of them are programs dedicated to Information Management and Information Systems (Program in Information Management & Information Systems); 35% — EP in Library Science (Program in Library Science); 31.5% — EP in Archive Science (Program in Archive Science). In terms of content, most EPs are interdisciplinary, which is due to the national information infrastructure digitalization and the focus of its components to support the basic technological processes of the information management life cycle. It is established that Chinese universities adhere to the IFLA Guidelines for Professional Library and Information Science (LIS) Educational Programs. The scientific topicality. It is substantiated that in the digital information market the content of modern librarian training should be updated with such relevant interdisciplinary educational components as: “Principles of competitive intelligence and artificial intelligence”, “Electronic library and consolidated information management”, “Intelligent control systems”, “Information security systems”, “Economics of Management and Information Industry”, “Methods of data mining”, “Knowledge extraction and management”, “Analysis and design of information systems”. The practical significance. Ukrainian institutions of higher education when improving educational programs in the can use the study results. Addressing to the best foreign practices of the library specialists training will allow increasing their competitiveness in the world information market and promoting better efficiency of the Ukrainian libraries work in the conditions of the society digitalization.

Discursive Marketisation Through Positive Evaluation: A Diachronic Analysis of About Us Texts of Top-Tier Chinese Universities Over the Past Two Decades

This study explored the marketisation process of top-tier Chinese universities by scrutinising their self-promotional strategies over the past two decades. Drawing on Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal framework, we identified all attitudinal markers in the About Us texts posted by 35 top-tier Chinese universities on their official websites at two time-points: the turn of the century and the year of 2021. The 35 universities were drawn from China’s “Double First Class” Initiative that prioritises the development of a select group of elite universities in China. Close textual analyses focussing on the attitudinal markers with reference to their contexts were conducted to identify the themes evaluated in the About Us texts; Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were run to quantitatively compare the relative frequencies of the attitudinal markers between the two phases, which was then supplemented by diachronic qualitative comparisons on the fine-grained linguistic features surrounding the markers. The study identified seven major themes positively appraised by the universities at both time-points. It also revealed diachronic differences in the use of attitudinal markers, reflecting a mediated change of promotional strategies over the past 20 years or so in the Chinese higher education context. These findings point to the influence of market, government, and tradition on Chinese top-tier universities’ promoting strategies and the role of social cognition in shaping student choice. They also suggest the emergence of a higher education system with Chinese characteristics that features a reconciliation of market and government forces.