Ask for efficiency from multi-party collaboration and technical management! The way to go digital in colleges and universities

Introduction | Colleges and universities are faced with the important task of accelerating the transformation and development and improving the quality of social services. As a new type of productive force, informatization plays an important role in it. The level of informatization has become an important criterion for measuring the comprehensive ability of schools. However, how to efficiently promote informatization work has become a difficult problem faced by many college information departments. In this issue, we have invited Mr. Zhang Miao, director of the Modern Education Technology Center of South-Central University for Nationalities and Tencent Cloud TVP industry ambassador, to share with us his review and reflections on the informatization construction of South-Central University for Nationalities.

About the Author

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Zhang Miao, Director of the Modern Education Technology Center of South-Central University for Nationalities, and Tencent Cloud TVP Industry Ambassador. He has been engaged in the construction and management of campus informatization for a long time, and led the team to win many awards in industry competitions such as SDN and network security.

1. Challenges faced by the development of informatization in colleges and universities

First, the coordinated development of informatization in colleges and universities involves government administrative departments, school decision-making levels, functional departments, teaching departments, teachers and students inside and outside the school, parents, and enterprises. Sex and dependence constraints. How to give full play to the role of participating subjects and solve the problems faced in the construction process has become a major challenge for the informatization planning and construction departments of colleges and universities.

Second, with the vigorous implementation of e-government and the popularization of Internet services, the level of informatization services in other social industries is generally higher than that in universities. Teachers and students in colleges and universities have used various Internet services for a long time, and they have also put forward higher requirements for the user experience of informatization construction.

Third, with the rapid development of cloud computing, 5G, artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain and other technologies, new information infrastructure is also facing upgrades. How to combine emerging technologies with school applications to provide better services for schools and become a Problems to be solved.

Fourth, the external environment is complex and changeable. In the face of various application scenarios during the special period of the epidemic, how to solve problems for schools and society, respond quickly and meet demands is another challenge encountered by the informatization department.

2. Practical ideas of informatization in colleges and universities

(1) Adhere to "big platform + medium system + micro-service" to achieve both long-term and short-term goals

Since the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan", the informatization work of South-Central University for Nationalities has always adhered to the construction concept of "big platform + medium system + micro-service". It is required to optimize the information system supply mode, encourage general business service platforms to realize low-cost, short-cycle, high-quality management informatization applications, and explore the use of application services to replace the construction of information systems. The guiding ideology is highly consistent.

The construction of a large platform is the cornerstone of our long-term development of informatization. We adhere to the combination of the underlying capabilities of the digital base on campus and general cloud services, emphasizing openness, stability, security, sustainability, and interconnection of all things, and provide public capabilities for management systems and microservices, such as identity Certification, authority assignment, message reminders, and quick approvals realize the deep integration of applications and platforms, so that teachers and students have a better experience in using services and improve service handling efficiency; in service construction, our school has always insisted on purchasing mature and stable products and personalized The combination of demand and service, innovating the school's own management, and continuing to help improve the efficiency of departmental management and the service experience of teachers and students in the informatization work; the school informatization construction department has always implemented the principle of "guarantee is the foundation, service is the ability, and innovation is development". Working philosophy, we believe that each informatization project of the school is the "nearest practice base" from teachers and students; every student trained in the base is the "best builder" of the smart campus.

Based on the ability of open large platform and general platform in the construction of personalized services and micro-services, it provides training bases, curriculum guidance and informatization practical projects for the training of school information management and software development talents, including the latest industry trends and knowledge systems in the industry , to provide teachers and students with "industry cutting-edge knowledge", and even product development at the forefront of the industry, to ensure that "what you have learned" in school and "can be used" in the enterprise, and use the competition of college students to promote learning through competition, improve the quality of student training, and thus increase employment. quality, and ultimately realize the effective combination of smart campuses.

(2) Locate common and individual needs, and find a balance between needs and efficiency

Ordinary colleges and universities undertake the five functions of talent training, scientific research, social services, cultural inheritance and innovation, and international exchanges and cooperation. There are many demands from various dimensions such as teaching and research services, management efficiency, teacher-student experience, and leadership decision-making. It is necessary to find a balance. This balance is efficiency. There are only 18 people in the modern education technology center, which is responsible for the whole school information security, network basic service guarantee, the whole school data center guarantee, the whole school teacher and student card service guarantee, the multimedia classroom and smart classroom service guarantee, the teaching resource production and the whole school informatization coordination work, etc. This poses a great challenge to the professionalism of our personnel and the boundaries of our work.

Following the construction idea of large platform + medium system + micro service, we go deep into the departments and business departments to explore common needs, take the initiative to think, and take the initiative to serve. And actively visit brother colleges and universities to learn advanced management experience, co-create with advanced enterprises, and learn product and service design concepts.

Finally, we conclude our principles for the construction of informatization demands:

• Through cooperation with large enterprises, government big data departments, and more professional enterprises, high-quality products and services can be prioritized to serve more people and more time;
• Through the process to unify the business of the departments, eliminate conflicts, one source, one source, and the public capability platform to undertake, reduce the repeated creation of wheels;
• Improve data quality and reduce data governance through application construction;
• Procurement of standardized services and cloud services, etc.

In view of the system and complexity of smart campus construction, and the "Zhongtai" as the hub for the integration of school business management, there is no doubt that we need to grasp the key "key" to break the situation. At present, the "three major platforms" recognized by digital campuses are far from being able to support the needs of upper-layer application agility and large-scale innovation. The "business middle platform" with shared capabilities for business integration is becoming the focus of the future development of smart campuses. Therefore, we cooperated with Tencent Cloud, using the [One-stop Service Center], with "one case, one door, one platform" as the core, making full use of the low-code management platform, integrated service platform, operation display platform and cloud component platform (scenario service, documentation, etc.) Collaboration) to meet the shared needs of our school management and professional assembly business needs. It is precisely because of the high availability, high stability, and container-based special service capabilities that our upper-layer applications and services can be cross-multiplexed.

In addition, the school’s scientific research and development requires supercomputing capabilities. When facing the needs of several colleges, we fully investigate the investment in the construction of supercomputing centers and the return on use of the supercomputing centers of our sister colleges, and fully discuss with our colleges the requirements for using computing resources, Frequency of use, etc. In the end, we chose the method of purchasing cloud services + overall planning, which not only met the needs of the college’s supercomputing, but also saved investment expenses and personnel investment in operation and maintenance management.

During the epidemic period, it is a big problem for visitors to enter the school. When entering the school, the interviewee provides the visitor with an appointment QR code, and the visitor fills in the personal identification information. It greatly simplifies the verification workload of the doorman and reduces the burden on the respondents. After the verification is passed, the visitor information is synchronized to the access control system in real time, and the submitted license plate number is automatically pushed to the motor vehicle access control system, and the vehicle authorization is issued according to the audited entry and exit time. To each school gate, the time for motor vehicles to wait in line at the school gate for verification is shortened. While many tasks of interpersonal contact are handled online, the process is also simplified and optimized, which improves the work efficiency of all parties.

During the epidemic prevention and control period, according to the school's overall planning and requirements for epidemic prevention and control, we jointly created the "Smart Campus Teachers and Students Health and Safety Management Platform" with Tencent Cloud's RayData big data visualization system to realize the joint presentation of multi-terminal and multi-source data, assisting The school effectively manages the health and safety of teachers and students. By connecting the national epidemic data, the school's overall overview data and the IoT equipment data, the platform centrally displays the school's epidemic prevention and control status and the current campus epidemic prevention situation, forming a visual "one picture" and realizing the college management "one-click knowledge of the overall situation". ” to provide data support for school operation monitoring, rapid disposal, and command coordination.

(3) Solve the problem of innovation and benefit from the old, and realize value innovation

The development of school informatization is affected by multiple factors such as the national overall plan, school development plan, information technology development, and the epidemic. This requires us to do top-level design planning and combine long-term development with short-term construction. Only in this way can we ensure that we can make use of the old in the future, protect the value of past informatization investment and construction, and generate new value through innovation.

The sudden outbreak of the epidemic has brought great changes to our teaching organization and security work. We must respond to the call of the Ministry of Education to "suspend classes without teaching, and without stopping learning", make full use of national platform resources and on-campus platform teaching resources, and quickly organize online teaching. To complete this work in such a short period of time, we can only make use of the old, using the past construction foundations such as multimedia classrooms, coupled with simple information technology transformation, to complete the technical realization of online and offline synchronous teaching in more than 200 classrooms, and give the whole school Teachers' technical support and guarantee work has carried out an unprecedented large-scale online teaching practice, successfully responded to the crisis of suspension of teaching and schooling brought about by the new crown pneumonia epidemic, and set off a "learning revolution". The proportion of teachers using blended teaching has increased significantly compared with before the epidemic, and a new set of educational programs including concepts, techniques, standards, methods, and evaluations have been formed.

(4) Multi-party joint organization for innovation, always focusing on teachers and students

On April 19, 2016, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out in his speech at the Symposium on Network Security and Informatization that "In order to develop the Internet informatization business, we must implement the people-centered development philosophy." Our informatization practitioners in colleges and universities must implement the teacher-student-centered development idea. In the final analysis, it reflects "serving the people". At the beginning of this year, Minister Huai Jinpeng emphasized that the education system vigorously promotes the informatization of education and the digital construction of educational resources. Ability, advantages, great potential and great achievements, we must firmly grasp the work philosophy of "methods are more important than technology, organizational system innovation is more important than technological innovation", and in accordance with the work requirements of "application is king, service first, demonstration leading, safe operation" and The integration of ideas promotes construction and application.

During the epidemic, we cooperated with various departments in the school to provide different services for teachers and students, and our teachers and students are full of happiness and sense of achievement. During the postgraduate registration examination, through the registration system and the teacher-student health platform, we can quickly identify those who have abnormal health codes in the registered students in advance, and cooperate with the graduate school and the school hospital to make independent examination room arrangements for such students in advance to ensure that they are safe and sound. To be able to take the test smoothly, to avoid students' identification on the spot and abnormal health code to affect the normal test, this service has been recognized by the district education bureau, and has been promoted in other brother colleges.

The above operation is simple and intuitive, which not only facilitates the school hospital to count the number of daily vaccine deployments, but also avoids long queues for teachers and students without appointments. The vaccination can be done as soon as the appointment time, which improves the vaccination experience and improves the willingness of teachers and students to be vaccinated. . Behind this convenient experience is the technical support of the big platform data sharing and application rapid development platform. The rapid launch of new tasks reflects the response to business needs and solving pain points. It is also the implementation of the general secretary's people-centered concept and response to The spirit of the minister's speech.

3. Prospects and plans for the transformation and development of informatization in colleges and universities

At present, we are at the beginning of the "14th Five-Year Plan". Colleges and universities are facing a new round of digital transformation of education, and more and more excellent digital products are playing a role in it. Tencent Cloud also provides more and more products. and solutions, we have noticed that it has assisted many sister schools in campus management and digital construction. In the future, we will also cooperate with more professional digital products, continue to increase investment in innovation, and prepare from the following aspects :

First, insist on making full use of the new generation of information technology represented by 5G, artificial intelligence, big data, etc., focusing on building cloud-network integration and new information infrastructure implementation and operation support systems such as 5G private network and F5G, and help schools with innovative and integrated architecture. Digital transformation, promote the comprehensive digitalization and intelligence of life services, teaching and research work, and make greater contributions to the development of our school and the services of teachers and students;

Second, continue to expand the scope of informatization coverage. During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, we will rely on the rapid development capabilities of our school's "big platform" to meet the service needs of school-level, departmental management, and teachers and students;

Third, with the acceleration of the online process of management and teacher-student services, we will open and share data to a greater extent, improve the efficiency of service handling, and realize "service search" through mobile and intelligent, improving service experience;

Fourth, in the past ten years, through application construction and the continuous use of teachers and students, our school has accumulated a large amount of data, which is an important asset of the school. We will promote the construction of data assets and continue to tap the value of data for the development of talents in the school. , teaching reform, discipline construction, safety prevention and control, etc. to provide more scientific decision-making basis;

Fifth, network and information security will still be our focus in the future. We will build a safe and credible information security system in accordance with the "Cyber Security Law", "Data Security Law", "Personal Information Protection Law" and other policy guidelines. Provide security for teacher and student services and data opening;

Sixth, the development of school informatization needs enterprise support. We will be more open, expand cooperation with enterprises, introduce high-quality enterprise concepts, products and services, and through co-creation methods, to meet the unique needs of our school, and to provide teachers and students with more personalized services. service.

In the future, we will always adhere to the work philosophy of "guarantee is the foundation, service is the ability, and innovation is the development", and strive to provide support and guarantee for our school to build a first-class, modern and high-level university that the people are satisfied with.