MoE to Allow Online Education

Taiwan News reports that the MoE is planning to permit local universities to offer online masters degrees that it will recognize. This has some interesting implications for several areas, but it will now be hard for the MoE to recognize local degrees but not recognize online degrees from quality universities overseas. Further, this also seems to be a way for the MoE to permit local universities to harvest $$ from students in China without actually having them physically present on the island. It also presents a massive new market to textbook and educational software developers, and will enable them to use Taiwan universities as platforms to launch software into the China market. A China-focused innovation?

The ministry plans to announce the list of qualified schools this September.

According to the MOE, the online courses will include humanities, art, business management, electrical engineering and computer science, while special courses will be provided for elementary and junior high school teachers to advanced their studies.

The ministry emphasized that to ensure high quality, the programs would be implemented under the principle of "active openness, effective management."

The Computer Center of the MOE stressed that all online courses and plans for online degree programs have to be examined to ensure the quality of the program implementation.

In addition, the MOE decided to loosen restrictions stipulating that total online credits recognized must be less than one-third of the minimum credits required for graduation from vocational schools, junior colleges, colleges and universities.

The ministry indicated that at present, over 60 schools conduct e-learning courses and nearly 40,000 students are taking online courses, adding that the figures proved that there is a tendency toward digital learning.

[Taiwan]