Correspondence education is a kind of distance education activity using communication methods. Participants are mainly self-study correspondence materials supplemented by face-to-face teaching. Teaching links include self-study textbooks, face-to-face tutoring, communication Q & A, intensive experiments, internships, lecture assignments, stage tests, final examinations or exams, graduation design or writing a dissertation. The host unit is a correspondence school, a full-time school, or an approved agency, group, or other institution. The "Opinions of the Ministry of Education on the Development of Correspondence Education and Evening Universities in Higher Education" approved by the State Council in 1980 stipulates that: students who have completed the prescribed courses and passed the examinations will be issued a graduation certificate by the host school, and the state will recognize their education; Subjects who pass the examinations will be issued a certificate of academic performance. [1]
Correspondence education
Correspondence education originated in the university promotion movement in Britain in the 1860s. Correspondence schools were established in capitalist countries after the 1980s. In China, the Commercial Press established a correspondence institute in 1914. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, correspondence education has developed greatly.
Correspondence: Normally, self-study is the main, and intensive face-to-face lectures of about 10 days or half a month are arranged about 3 times per school year. Face-to-face time is generally winter and summer vacation. Some students are usually busy and may not have time to study in class. They can study independently at home and adjust their spare time vacation so that they can arrange the time to attend school when they are concentrated in face-to-face teaching. The main links of correspondence teaching include: counseling and answering questions, homework, experiments, internships, examinations, curriculum design, graduation design and defense. The school will send a unified schedule to the college for reference. So as to achieve a win-win effect.
Amateur: Schedule classes at night or on weekends. Because a large number of candidates are social employees and have their own lives, at the same time, we all hope that both classes and work are correct. Adult college entrance examinations are arranged from the perspective of the candidates, so when you get off work When you can study, you can use Saturdays and Sundays to teach. This relieves many office workers' troubles. In their spare time, they can handle the work well and study without delay. [2]
Students learn by themselves under the written guidance of teachers, make full use of their spare time, and study according to the correspondence teaching plan and syllabus;
The learning form is flexible and flexible, which is suitable for the study of employees in many mobile departments such as railways, highways, geology, and water conservancy, as well as for employees with special working conditions and household chores;
The professional setting is highly targeted and practical, and the students learn without leaving production, and the results are fast;
Less money, no need to build a new school building, you can make full use of existing teachers and various teaching facilities.
exam subjects
Adult college entrance examination subjects
Layer [3]
Strengthen ideological and political education.
Emphasis on the teaching of basic theories, and implement the principle of less and refinement, so that correspondence students can learn basic theories well in a limited spare time.
Combination of unity and flexibility. On the premise of ensuring that the training goals are met, pay attention to teaching according to aptitude. Correspondence students with excellent academic performance can take courses in the teaching plan of this major in advance. Correspondence students can apply for the examinations for courses they have already mastered. After completing the courses specified in the teaching plan in advance, all teaching links meet the requirements, and those who pass the examination results can graduate early.
Make reasonable arrangements for lessons. [4]
The development of things always goes through the four stages of infancy, growth, peak, and decline. The same is true of correspondence education. Correspondence education has a history of hundreds of years, but just as we are more and more used to using smartphones instead of ordinary mobile phones, correspondence education has also been continuously impacted by online education. In the 21st century Internet era, we always feel less and less time and less time for learning. We are gradually being utilitarian and entertaining. Let's talk about the problems facing correspondence education: [5]
A sense of backwardness in correspondence education
Correspondence education has evolved from mailing to correspondence at first, and has evolved to establishing correspondence education. This form has continued to this day, and it has hardly changed. After decades of development in our external world, interpersonal communication and communication methods have undergone dramatic changes. In addition to traditional correspondence, telephones, mobile phones, and computers have developed rapidly to varying degrees. Our correspondence education model, in addition to the traditional method, uses modern communication methods very little. Now we mainly use the face-to-face teaching mode where correspondence stations are set up in various places, one teacher and one book. At the end, the form of correspondence education has not kept up with the development of the times, and the modern scientific and technological achievements of fast and convenient selection have not been selected to serve correspondence education. This has given people a sense of backwardness in correspondence education, which has affected the correspondence education to a certain extent. Education application rate. Because the engineering contradictions of correspondence students are very prominent now, the students hope that they can use the most convenient way to conduct correspondence studies so that their own learning and work will not be delayed. However, our correspondence education is quite backward in using online media to serve correspondence education.
Weakness and Confusion in the Internal Management of Correspondence Education
The normal operation of correspondence education depends on various rules and regulations to ensure. It can be said that the rules and regulations of correspondence education sites play a very important role in regulating correspondence education, ensuring the healthy development of correspondence education, and improving the quality of correspondence education. But we can't deny that there are many correspondence sites nowadays, which seem to be so weak in the implementation of rules and regulations, and some have almost become a display on the wall. Especially in the past ten years or so, due to the sharp decline in the number of students applying for correspondence courses, in order to compete for students, they have stabilized the correspondence students who have been studying, maintaining the survival of their correspondence sites, and continuing their debilitating lives. Many correspondence sites are mostly online for students. On the one side, as long as the correspondence students pay the fees, everything else can be discussed.
The correspondence teaching process is mainly composed of self-study, face-to-face teaching and examination. There is no need to contradict, as long as people who have experienced or have knowledge of correspondence education know that as a supplement to higher education that is mainly self-study and supplemented by face-to-face education, the current self-study link of correspondence education is actually in A state of laissez-faire, unsupervised, all due to the consciousness of the students, lack of the constraints or inspections of the system or regulations; and the attendance and absence of the face-to-face lectures, there are not many people who really care about the normal roll-call system , Has become a dispensable article; but even so, it will hardly affect the normal graduation of correspondence students, the loose examination system of correspondence education, and even the serious correspondence students will gradually become lazy. Trainees: Because those trainees who almost never participate in face-to-face training, they will still get the same results as those who study hard during normal examinations. It is conceivable to what extent the loose examination system of correspondence education has been "relaxed". The continuation of this teaching state has naturally caused the decline in the quality of correspondence education. This has directly led to a decline in the gold content of correspondence education.
The Impact of Self-study Examinations in Higher Education
The higher education self-study exam is a form of higher education based on individual self-study, social aid and the unified national examination. It has been 25 years since 1981. It has attracted the attention of a large number of young students, and has promoted on-the-job education and post-university continuing education by adopting a lenient policy and not enrolling in the college entrance examination for adults. The self-study exam has its unique advantages: it allows anyone to apply for the exam, and it is not affected by any time and any place in learning, thereby solving the engineering contradictions that are difficult to solve by correspondence education. The most difficult part of the self-study exam is its test level, but it is also because of its seriousness that in the adult education series, the self-study exam has the highest gold content. Some people who want to really learn something, and some people who don't have much time to study, will choose to take the self-study exam. This will inevitably have a lot of impact on correspondence education.
Impact of Higher Online Education
Distance Education
From the perspective of its essence, higher network education can be regarded as an extension of correspondence education. However, once higher online education was stripped from correspondence education, it leaped forward with its rapid speed, and the higher correspondence education was thrown away far away, and formed into an independent form of adult education. Although higher online education has caused many problems due to its rapid speed, the development momentum is obvious to all: after only five years of development, the cumulative number of registered students in distance education in China has exceeded 2 million. . This not only has a great impact on correspondence education, but also on self-study exams that have always had a good impact. Coupled with the expansion of colleges and universities in the mid-to-late 1990s, the number of correspondence students has dropped sharply, and correspondence education is facing a severe test.
In addition, radio and television universities, night universities, and workers' universities also inhibit the correspondence education. Correspondence education has been caught in the chase before and after multiple education. Correspondence education in the gap, its survival is naturally greatly affected. [6]
Revive countermeasures
Pay attention to the construction and implementation of the system
Every link of correspondence education must have a system to ensure it. Therefore, the construction of the system seems very necessary. Among these systems, the author believes that the guidance of face-to-face and self-study management and the management of examinations and assessments are particularly important, such as the formulation of the implementation methods of the main links of correspondence education, the methods of assessment and examination of correspondence courses, and the methods of appointment of correspondence teachers to implement the correspondence by face And self-study supervision, standardized examination room rules, and building a good teacher team: these are also one of the effective measures to improve the quality of correspondence education. The problem is that various correspondence sites are not lacking such rules and regulations, but rather a considerable number of correspondence sites have not seriously implemented such a system. In this regard, the implementation of some areas of the regulations is indeed difficult, but it does not exclude that some of our correspondence management teachers, as analyzed above, for various reasons, do not want to, or dare not implement these systems seriously. This makes these systems useless. As a result of this, a strange phenomenon has also occurred: a considerable portion of correspondence students, on the one hand, are conducting correspondence studies, while the other side is ridiculing or despising correspondence education. The establishment and especially implementation of the rules and regulations of correspondence education in this context has become a very necessary part of the work to regulate correspondence education. Therefore, it is time for us to make up our minds and build up, especially to implement the correspondence rules and regulations we have established. Otherwise, some people have begun to wonder: how long can the correspondence last, and it will become a reality. [6]
Exploring new correspondence courses and improving the quality of correspondence education
Correspondence education in the gap between multiple adult education is in danger of being forced into a dead end. In order to cope with the pressure of multi-adult higher education on correspondence education, in addition to strengthening their internal construction, each correspondence station must explore new ways of correspondence education:
1. The integration of the same correspondence major in each university
Correspondence sites set up by colleges and universities in China have their own political affairs. I was wondering, under the unified umbrella of correspondence education, can universities of the same specialty be united to unify the impact of other forms of higher vocational education on correspondence education? For example, such as forestry majors in gardening, China's four major forestry universities have established correspondence sites in different provinces in China. Some of these sites, because of the expansion of colleges and universities in the second half of the nineties, and the rise of online education, the enrollment of correspondence education has been very difficult, and some have reached the edge of unsustainability.
2.Unification of all correspondence colleges in all aspects
Due to the fragmentation of the correspondence stations in universities in China, the waste of human, material and financial resources is amazing, and it gives people a feeling of messy correspondence education. In order to change this bad impression, can the teaching plans and syllabuses of correspondence stations in universities and colleges, the textbooks of the same major and the main rules and regulations be unified? And in the specific teaching process, can face-to-face and self-study guidance have the same opinions? As a result, it will give people a sense of uniformity and collective power, and it will change people's impression of the messy correspondence education.
3.Practice the principle of separation between teaching and examination
In the examination of correspondence education, we basically practice the method of who teaches, who issues the papers, and who reviews it. The advantage of this method is that the pass rate of correspondence education will be very high. On the other hand, under the background of high pass rate, the quality of correspondence education will gradually decline. No one will understand this. Therefore, the author has always believed that the correspondence education must implement the principle of separation between teaching and examination, and take strict examination room discipline. This can not only improve the attendance rate of correspondence students, but also increase the teacher's sense of responsibility for teaching, and can accordingly improve the quality of correspondence education, and reverse the decline in the quality of correspondence education.
4. Change the way of entering college by correspondence
Regarding the method of enrolling at the correspondence college level, the adult college entrance examination is changed to the registration mode of exemption from examinations. In this regard, it can be aligned with the self-study examination. At the same time, it is necessary to do a good job of changing people's ideology and concepts, and to change the diploma education mainly based on the needs of diplomas, becoming a conscious behavior needed for self-improvement of lifelong education.
5. Marriage with high technology
At the beginning of correspondence education, correspondence between teachers and students was mainly based on correspondence. With the development of society to this day, the means of communication between people have become more and more abundant, especially the emergence of online media, which has further changed people's way of life and thinking. Online media has served our lives and work extensively. Similarly, online media can also serve our correspondence education. We can publish videos of face-to-face lectures, arrange homework, provide self-study guidance, exchange views between teachers and students, and so on. This is also a kind of teaching compensation for those correspondence students who cannot attend face-to-face courses as scheduled due to various reasons. If our correspondence education can gradually develop towards the network, then the more prominent "contradictions between engineering and learning" in correspondence education may find a better solution. In short, correspondence and network marriage are both a need for development and a teaching method that students like. This is very helpful for correspondence education. [7]
