# Institutional perspectives on the Chinese National Top Level Courses Project


This section will provide a view of the Top Level Courses Project from
the institutional perspective. Based on interviews with professors,
administrators, and some published literature and reports, I will first
describe some cases for how universities organize the selection of
courses.

University-level Top Level Course selection is organized and implemented
by individual universities, based on their course development plans and
the courses that are traditionally highly ranked internally. From
courses that have already developed good materials, have distinguishing
features, and can play an inspirational role for other teachers, the
university administration will choose a certain number of courses, and
invest in their further development.

University B has a long tradition for educational technology, and was
one of the first universities to have a course designated as Top Level
in 2003. The work on developing Top Level Courses, and the use of this
process as a lever to improve the educational quality at the university,
continues to have high priority.

The academic affairs office at University B is very concerned with
whether courses are well enough constructed, so that they will have a
high potential for winning in the provincial and national competitions.
Their self-described strength is their “pre-application process”. All 20
departments in the university can propose courses, and these get a small
amount of seed money for development. The courses that are selected for
this internal process are courses that are already impressive, with many
having gone through a period of more than ten years of development.
However, they have to be updated, and they especially have to develop
online material that reflect well on the course.

The courses are given 1-2 months for development, and after that, they
create an expert committee composed of internal and external experts
that begin evaluating the courses. The external experts come from other
high-ranking universities in the region. This evaluation is based mainly
on the available online resources, but a supervisory committee made up
of very experienced and retired teachers also goes to listen in on
classes, and solicit students’ evaluations of the teaching materials.
The task of the academic affairs office is not to get directly involved
in evaluation, but rather to coordinate the process.

The internal university committee discusses the strengths and weaknesses
of each course, especially where there is a difference in opinion with
the external experts, and the best courses are proposed as provincial
and national courses. The teachers who have already had a course
accepted as a provincial or national Top-Level Course also contribute to
share their experiences of the process.

University B has an ambitious goal for developing Top Level Courses,
they want 700-800 of their 3000 courses to reach Top Level status, which
would represent 30% of courses. Their short-term goal is to get 500 Top
Level courses between 2012 and 2015, which should include all obligatory
courses. In addition, they are spending considerable energy trying to
put up recordings for every single lecture for all their 124 existing
Top Level Courses, to complement the requisite representative lectures.
This focus on improving existing Top Level Courses is also reflected in
their annual monitoring process, where all heads of departments sit
around a table, display one course at a time on a projector, and check
how much of the course contents has been updated.

When interviewing the person in charge of coordinating the development
of Top Level Courses at University A, he put much less focus on the
process of quality improvement. “Here the teachers and courses are
already very good, so we don’t have to do too much work to improve
them.” Mr. A0 believes that professors from University A have strong
moral values, and would work hard on improving their courses even
without such competitions, but he acknowledged that internal competition
between colleagues in the same department can push professors to work
harder on improving courses. Similar to the case at University B, most
courses entered into the Top Level Courses selection process at
University A are courses that have a long history of development as
excellent courses, and were not developed specifically for the Top Level
Courses Project.

I also quote extensively from a detailed published case study concerning
[Lanzhou City College](http://www.lztc.edu.cn/).

Wang Xueyin (2008) has published a quite detailed case study from the
development of Top Level Courses at Lanzhou City College, and their
process has many similarities with the one at University B. After the
province put out the call for Top Level Courses applications, the
university began by calling a meeting with all the heads of departments,
to ask them to identify top courses that had potential to become a Top
Level Course. They then established a teaching committee to identify
basic and specialized courses that were relevant, and brought the
teachers of those courses together with personnel from the computer
department to discuss how online teaching materials could be
constructed. Like at University B, the school decided to provide some
funding to construct the initial courses.

The main guiding philosophy was that the construction of Top Level
Courses would support the improvement of quality of all the courses at
the school, and ideally the courses that could have the most impact on
the entire department would be selected. The university administration
also underlined the point that the idea was not to simply recycle
existing courses online, but rather to think through the design, and
update the teaching methodology and content. When the course development
was complete, the university organized an online blind peer-review of
the course, and based on this, determined whether to award the
university-level Top Level Course designation.

Thus, the universities play a key role in the selection of Top Level
Courses:

As we have seen from these three case studies, universities play a key
role in the Top Level Courses Project, selecting potential candidates
and supporting their development, until they can be selected as a
university-level Top Level Course. Universities also have to submit an
annual report about the construction and sharing of Top Level Courses,
including updating and keeping the resources available, students’ use
and feedback, support from the school, the open sharing situation of the
resource, amount of resources spent on developing the course, and how
much the university is spending on supporting development economically
and organizationally (Liu Zenghui 2009).

Promotion to higher levels

The announcement of university-level Top Level Courses is made public,
and anyone can both visit the course website, as well as provide
feedback. If there are no strong objections to the course during this
period, the decision will be made to suggest the course for a higher
level designation (provincial level, and then national level).

The provincial level

The provincial bureau of education is responsible for planning the
distribution of provincial level Top Level Courses based on the
provincial plan for educational development and course development.
Based on this, the provincial bureau of education will ensure the
completion of the provincial level project, as well as the suggestion of
courses for the national level selection. The courses that enter the
provincial level selection process must already have been designated as
university-level Top Level courses. The province then organizes an
online blind peer-review by subject specialists, based on provincial
evaluation criteria, which may differ by province. The courses selected
are made public, and awarded the provincial level designation, as well
as a sum of money to support the further development of the courses.

The national level is the final step - it has more stringent selection
criteria, and a higher reward.

The final step is the national level Top Level Courses, organized by the
national Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education is the highest
level organization responsible for the organization and management of
the Top Level Courses Project, organizing the selection of different
types of courses (undergraduate courses, vocational courses and online
courses), providing guidance around the entire process of developing and
evaluating courses, and supervising the annual evaluation and selection
of courses at all levels. The selection of national level courses is
similar to the university-level and provincial level process, however
the requirements for each indicator (course quality, course evaluation
management, financial support, quality control, etc) are much stricter.

To conclude:

From the description above, we can see that the Top Level Courses are
awarded different levels of designations (which to a certain extent
reflect their level of maturity). The financial support arrives after
the course has already been developed, which means that the university
first has to use its own money to invest in course development, before
the course can receive additional support when selected to higher
levels. This is congruent with the original intent of the project, which
was to stimulate universities to invest more in course development.

The three levels in the selection of Top Level Courses follow similar
processes, and in practice, to improve the linkages between the three
levels, most university-level and provincial level selections employ the
same standards as the national selection (Wang Long, personal
communications). This also serves to raise the quality of courses at all
levels. In addition, since the entire process of development, sharing,
and peer-review of courses happens through the Internet, the educational
technology demands are quite high. The focus on digitization of
resources, teaching and learning in online settings, communication
between students and teachers, generative assessments, etc., all help
promoting the integration of information technology and teaching and
learning in higher education.

* * * * *

The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis "The Chinese National Top
Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote
Quality in Undergraduate Teaching" by Stian Håklev, University of
Toronto 2010.

-   [Download the canonical PDF
  version](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses/Haklev_Stian_201009_MA_thesis.pdf)
-   [Central page collecting all blog posts, many different download
  formats, and supplementary
  material](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses)

* * * * *