Livestreaming program narrows urban-rural educational gap

Livestreaming of high-quality city schools' classes to classrooms in remote areas is being regarded as a possible solution to the educational disparity between China's urban and rural areas, China Daily reported Tuesday.

An autonomous county in a poverty-striken area of southwest China's Yunnan Province introduced the livestreaming program at two schools in 2006.

Some 152 students from the two schools were admitted to top-level universities this year, a year-on-year increase of 55 percent, said Wang Kaifu, head of the county's education bureau, adding that the best two were accepted at Peking and Tsinghua universities, which was rarely seen since the 1980s.

Yan Feng, a professor of Shanghai-based Fudan University, said that distance-learning technology has brought new hope for education equality.

This year, 37,000 students from impoverished regions were admitted by China's 140 top universities, accounting for around 10 percent of the total, said the paper.

Editor: John Li