Resource provides students, teachers tools to deal with emotional issues

The Smart Education of China online platform has added a psychological health section to help students and teachers better deal with emotional issues, the Ministry of Education said.

The section has four online psychological courses produced by well-known universities and more than 200 short video tutorials on a wide range of topics such as interpersonal relations, emotional adjustment, time management and relationship advice, said Wang Dengfeng, director of the Ministry of Education's department of physical education, health and the arts.

There is a "feelings wall' where students and teachers are encouraged to express themselves in any way, anonymously. There is also a Q&A section where they can post questions that will be answered by psychology experts, he said.

The section includes psychological counseling hotlines operated by the ministry and experts at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, Hubei province, and East China Normal University in Shanghai, Wang said. The hotlines are open to students and teachers at all levels as well as to the general public.

Most Chinese universities have set up psychological counseling centers, and the ministry will integrate these resources with the online platform and invite more psychology experts in the education sector to answer the hotlines or to provide written feedback to students and teachers in need, he added.

The ministry has taken a variety of measures to help students tackling psychological issues, including offering compulsory courses on psychological health and offering annual psychological evaluations to students.

The Smart Education of China platform, www.smartedu.cn, launched by the ministry in March, integrates platforms for primary and secondary school education, vocational education and higher education, and a platform for employment services for college graduates.

Xu Mei, spokeswoman for the ministry, said a total of 2.22 billion visits have been made to the primary and secondary school education platform as of April 27.

Eight provincial-level regions hit hard by recent COVID-19 outbreaks have recorded more than 2 million daily visits as students switched to online schooling, she said. To better facilitate online learning by students, given a resurgence in COVID-19, a mobile application for the primary and secondary school education platform went into operation recently.

The app is based on the website learning platform, utilizing the same resources as the website such as course teaching, after-school services and family education, Xu said.

The higher education platform has been visited by people in 129 countries and regions, and the vocational education platform now includes more than 8,000 courses in almost 2,000 majors, she added.