Bidirectional Promotion of Ideological and Political Education in Curriculum and Online Teaching—Taking Online Teaching of Mathematics as an Example

Abstract

In consideration of the influence brought by COVID-19, online teaching has been implemented among all students at all grades throughout the whole China for the very first time, and consequently, many teachers focusing on teaching career and scientific research became “network anchors”. After all, each education fellow needs to face and solve the problem of how to integrate online teaching with ideological and political education in curriculum in depth in face of the new situation so that they could be promoted mutually. This paper elaborates the mutual promotion of ideological and political education in curriculum and online teaching as well as the relevant explorations on their further promotion in the post-epidemic period. As explicitly specified in the Guiding Opinions on the Organization and Management of Online Education in Universities and Colleges during the Epidemic Prevention and Control Period promulgated by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China during the outbreak of COVID-19, universities and colleges should…carry out online teaching activities such as online teaching and online learning actively during the epidemic prevention and control period in order to achieve the purpose of “teaching and learning out of class” and guarantee both teaching progress and quality[1]. With online teaching implemented among all students at all grades throughout the whole China for the very first time, many teachers focusing on teaching career and scientific research became “anchors”. After all, each education fellow needs to face and solve the problem of how to integrate online teaching with ideological and political education in curriculum in depth in face of the new situation so that they could be promoted mutually. The ideological and political education in curriculum (hereinafter referred to as “the Education”) essentially means taking the guidance of ideal and belief, value idea and moral concept as the very important teaching contents and implementing the above in the teaching process of professional courses, besides imparting professional knowledge, so as to form the pattern of super ideological and political and big moral education together with ideological and political courses and finally character and civic virtue subtly[2]. According to the report on Make Overall Plans, Cope with Changes and Create a New Pattern—Win the Battle of Revitalizing Undergraduate Education Comprehensively made by Wu Yan, the director of the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education in Xiamen University in August 2020, the essence of winning the battle lies in the Education. He affirmed the contributions that the Education had made to online teaching totally. By responding to the relevant deployment and arrangement of the Ministry of Education on “teaching and learning out of class” actively, our university was active in exploring online teaching based on platforms such as MOOC, Superstar Learning and Zhihuishu on February 17, 2020 and opened 11 mathematics courses, including the self-developed MOOC Advanced Mathematics IIA, Advanced Mathematics IIB, Advanced Mathematics IIC, Mathematical Statistics, Management Statistics, etc. Education essentially means enabling students to study and is aimed to improve their comprehensive quality. The ideological and political factors in course teaching are explored on the basis of realizing the teaching objective so as to educate people subtly. By taking the course Mathematical Statistics as an example, the course team introduced “collecting and sorting of statistical data” in virtue of the chart of changing trend of COVID-19 infection growth (Figure 1) so that students could fully understand the severity of the current epidemic, learn about the epidemic's development tread with fluctuating data in a scientific and reasonable manner and motivate their interests data analyzing, disposing and exploring. Students were also encouraged to adjust their study and life at home, eliminate their anxiety and panic, and enhance their confidence in winning the fight against the epidemic. The traditional “teaching + learning” mode can be changed into “learning + teaching” mode by integrating the Education into the mathematics course teaching and fully exerting the leading role of “ideological and political elements” to achieve students-based teaching and focus on three dimensions of students’ development and learning and learning effect [3] in order to center on students, motivate their endogenous power of learning, change their learning attitude from passively to initiatively, and liberate teachers from the operation and control work so that they could have more time focusing on teaching design and realization of teaching goal. Practice shows that in the “learning + teaching” mode, students become more active in class teaching and their satisfactory degree has increased to 92% from 85% at the very beginning. Therefore, students could obtain a higher sense of achievements. The ideological and political factors are all inclusive. The course team developed the Education by choosing the contents in such aspects as patriotism, cultural history, professional quality and value orientation based on teaching contents of mathematics courses and explored the class examination reform in depth. For example, Advanced Mathematics IIA is assessed in the form of Xuexitong process assessment (40%) + online final examination score (40%) + course summary assessment (20%). Students should be guided from the course learning objective so as to make transformation from learning mathematics to using it, from mastering knowledge point to highlighting the quality of mathematics learning, from doing mathematics questions to considering with it in order to foster students’ professional quality of concerning learning, in-depth thinking and lifelong learning. Lin Yifu, a famous economist and the professor at Peking University once said: “Such a positive and open measure not only helps China to shoulder the responsibilities of world's higher education but also means an initiative action for sharing the Chinese wisdom and enhancing China's speaking right and influence!” Director Wu Yan pointed out in the report that the core for winning the fight against the epidemic was online teaching. In the spring term of 2020, there were 1.0845 million online teachers from the universities nationwide. The online teaching reached 3.537 billion person-times and online courses were 17.1968 million course-times. Online teaching had the all-dimensional coverage of all regions. With unprecedented scale, range and degree, the large-scale online education practice exerts profound influence on the learning revolution and paradigmatic reform significance of China's and even the world's higher education. The international organizations such as UNESCO and the experts of different countries highly affirmed China's online teaching achievements during the epidemic period. Robert Paru, the Education Division Head of the Chinese Representative Office of the UNESCO said: “we really appreciate China's sharing with the whole world on its online teaching of higher education and wish we could have further cooperation.” Nicolas Dirks, the former president of the University of California, Berkeley said that “China's colleges and universities lead the education research field and play a leading role in providing high-quality online education for the students all over the world”. This is actually a typical and vivid case about the Education. Each student in each class could feel the strengths, wisdoms and plans that China offered in terms of the fight against the epidemic, education and teaching in the era of Internet + education. All these unprecedented actions not only become a significant event along the history but also mean a surprise to the whole world. With the action above, we have enhanced our national self-confidence and national pride. Every teacher and every student involving online teaching are proud of being a Chinese. Mathematics is a kind of very amazing subject. The basic ideas that the mathematics courses follow for solving problems are to establish a mathematical model against the actual problem on the basis of analyzing their quantity relations. Some special expressive symbols, which are written in streamline form, smooth and charming, are used to quantize the specific relations. For many actual issues such as the area of trapezoid with curve side, continuous compounding, volume of column with curved edge, irregular column, etc., the course team reflected the rules of graphics generation in the online teaching live streaming room directly and specifically in the form of animation by using the mathematics software. Students cannot help claiming the charm of mathematics! It is worth mentioning that the esthetics in mathematics courses is not confined to the charm of form, for the charm can also be reflected in the logic. Internal logic of the teaching contents is stressed in a majority of mathematics courses. For instance, in the course Advanced Mathematics, when introducing the contents of Chapter 1 Functions and Limits, the course team guided students to expand the studies on the limit issues in the elementary mathematics in the advanced mathematics to discuss the infinity so as to guide them study from the limit to “infinity”, “infinitely close” and “trend”. In addition, when introducing the concept of limit, the general function limit was expanded from the simplest and most direct sequence limit, which is just the general rules for cognitive development (from special to general). Similarly, after the limit of the simple basic function is introduced, four arithmetic operations and composite function—the most commonly used mathematic algorithm was used to expand the simple limit to the limit of a complicated function. Practice proves that the integration of such kind of ideological and political elements by the co