BEIJING, April 3 (Xinhua) -- Jia Yuran, a third-grade pupil from China's southernmost school on Yongxing Island, enjoys her painting classes most because the internet has enabled her to take the course with her urban peers some 400 km away.
Jia is one of the four primary school students in Sansha, a city in China's southernmost island province of Hainan.
Thanks to an online program, they now have access to the same quality classes including painting, music, math and traditional Chinese culture as peers in Hainan's capital city of Haikou.
"The internet helps alleviate, to some extent, the shortfall of teachers and enables us to offer a wider range of classes other than main subjects in spite of the small number of students we have," said Zhang Li, a teacher at Jia's Yongxing School.
As China goes digital in education, quality educational resources that were once unique to developed urban regions are rapidly extending to classrooms in frontier and rural areas.
Like Jia, close to 100 million rural Chinese students in primary and middle schools are covered by a national satellite broadband transmission network for online education.
Since late 2012, the proportion of primary and high schools that have access to the internet have grown from 25 percent to 96 percent, according to Wednesday's People's Daily.
The internet infrastructure allows ongoing enrichment of digital educational resources and improvement of teachers' knowledge.
A national online public platform for educational resources was put into operation in late 2012.
By May 2017, all primary and high schools had been able to retrieve for free some 19 million items of learning materials covering all 12 grades, figures from the newspaper show.
The internet infrastructure connects not only students with quality education, but also rural teachers with top education specialists.
South China Normal University has launched an online training program, gathering experienced teachers to form workshops, each of which allows 300 teachers to take classes.
In addition, the university set up a remote diagnosis center, in which education specialists watch rural teachers prepare classes via live streaming on mobile devices or review their recorded classes to spot problems and offer tailor-made advice for them to improve.
In April last year, the Ministry of Education released an action plan to step up efforts in applying information technology to education, pledging to bring internet access to all primary and middle schools across the country.
"The key lies in introducing information technologies to the whole process of learning and teaching activities as a way to advance balanced urban and rural education," said Yang Zongkai, president of Xi'an-based Xidian University.
"I expect systemic reform in education as the sector further goes digital," Yang noted.
