At the No.1 Middle School in Namling County, Xizang Autonomous Region, located at an altitude of over 4,000 meters, students now access video teaching materials through the Xizang Education Zhufeng Qiyun platform. The platform, and the computer-filled classrooms students use to access it, are part of the region's ongoing efforts to digitalize education. With the rapid advancement of digital technology, the establishment of a "cloud classroom," which brings together diverse online courses, narrows the educational resource gap between regions, and urban and rural areas. It also offers a model for improving educational equity around the world. 

Resource sharing 

The core challenge of educational equity is the spatial imbalance and temporal lag in resource allocation. Under the traditional education model, high-quality teaching staff, curriculum resources and teaching tools are heavily concentrated in urban and economically developed areas. In contrast, remote regions have long suffered from "educational isolation" due to geographical barriers and inadequate infrastructure. The essence of technology-enabled education is to use digital means to reshape the spatio-temporal distribution of educational resources, allowing them to transcend physical limitations and create a new paradigm of "cloud-based sharing."

The rapid advancement of digital infrastructure has transformed the vision into a tangible reality. By the end of 2023, the Internet access rate of primary and secondary schools in China had reached 100 percent and the coverage of multimedia classrooms had exceeded 99 percent. Even in the remote mountainous areas of the less developed Guizhou Province, for example, primary school students can join the same English class as their urban peers through

live-streaming. The Teach in Tandem model further enhances this by enabling teachers as distant as Beijing and Lhasa, the capital of Xizang that is more than 3,500 km away from Beijing, to collaborate on lesson planning and delivery, and allowing students from both locations to participate in the same class simultaneously.

Leveraging digitalization, a single high-quality teaching resource can be efficiently replicated and disseminated at scale, achieving rapid and widespread adoption. The Western China MOOC Teacher Training Program 2.0 online platform provides 198,000 MOOC (massive open online course) classes and customized courses, with annual visits by students of universities in west China reaching 540 million.

The Xizang Education Zhufeng Qiyun platform integrates diverse teaching and research materials from top-notch teachers in the autonomous region and even from across the country with unique Tibetan-language teaching aids. Teachers and students in Xizang can use these resources for free. In this way, the sharing of educational resources is realized, empowering individuals to learn anytime, anywhere and from anyone.

Non-profit education 

Fueled by hi-tech innovations, the concept of teaching students according to their aptitudes is advancing toward scaled

personalized education. AI algorithms convert traditional one-to-many teaching into one-to-one learning support. This transformation not only enhances the pertinence and effectiveness of education but also greatly enriches teaching methods and strategies.

In March 2025, teachers at the No.2 High School in Nyingchi City in Xizang began using an AI-empowered evaluation technology. This technology captures in-class details like student engagement and response, as well as learning outcomes. On this basis, it provides a critical foundation for matching course content, adjusting teaching strategies, customizing learning plans and delivering targeted resources.

In 2023, China launched the first phase of its Digital Volunteer Teaching Innovation Experiment program, delivering over 2,500 courses in science, art and other subjects to 14,000 rural primary and middle school students. The non-profit Online Tutoring Together program has mobilized college student volunteers from more than 560 universities across the country to provide accompanying education such as reading, sports and cultural expansion for rural students.

The UNESCO Strategy on Technological Innovation in Education (2022-25) program underscores that it supports human-centered innovation in the use of technologies for education to help ensure equitable and inclusive quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. Central to this vision is prioritizing

technological support for the most marginalized groups, where AI technology once again demonstrates its unique advantages. Advanced technologies like computer vision-based emotion recognition algorithms can dynamically adapt teaching pace to meet the needs of special education students, thereby boosting their classroom participation. In a pilot project at a special education school in Beijing, the classroom participation of students with autism was significantly improved by the use of these technologies.

Global impact 

Digital technology facilitates the pursuit of the universal value of educational equity and offers a new development paradigm for building a global community of shared future in education. This digital transformation is not only the application of technology in specific countries, but also a process of human pursuit of education for all.

China's digital education model provides a new framework for global education governance through technological innovation, institutional reform and cultural integration. In Ethiopia, Chinese tech firm Huawei has supported 300 primary and secondary schools by building smart campus networks featuring high-bandwidth Internet access, Wi-Fi coverage and simplified management and maintenance.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, NetDragon, a Chinese operator of massively multiplayer online games, built online learning communities for students in the United States, Thailand, Egypt, Serbia and other countries. It also supported local governments by providing online teacher training and basic education services.

China initiated the establishment of the World Digital Education Alliance at the 2024 World Digital Education Conference and launched the international version of its National Smart Education Public Service Platform. This platform gathers high-quality educational resources from around the world, supports multiple languages and enables learners from different countries to access personalized educational services.

The right to education, as one of the fundamental human rights, is directly related to the individual's right to development and the overall progress of society. In the digital and intelligent age, technology has emerged as a crucial tool for advancing educational equity and upholding human rights. However, significant challenges remain, such as disparities in access to digital devices and networks and variations in the quality of educational resources. This requires further integration of technologies such as AI and 5G, as well as a deeper combination of technological tools with the concern for humanity, thereby achieving the ultimate transition from "efficiency first" to comprehensive human development.

The flow of educational resources has shifted from the arduous journey in the physical world to the free movement in the digital world. The "cloud classroom" enables education to transcend boundaries and borders. From the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau to the Amazon rainforest and from urban classrooms to rural teaching sites, China's practice has proven that technology can become the greatest facilitator of educational equity. As long as the people are at the center and innovation is the driving force, the vision of educational equity will eventually become a reality. BR

The author is an assistant research fellow at the Center for Science, Technology and Human Rights at Beijing Institute of Technology 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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