NJCIT co-hosted the "East–West Pairing Assistance Collaboration Plan on Artificial Intelligence Vocational Education Task Implementation Conference and AI Enterprises Visiting the West" event

From June 1 to 2, under the guidance of the Jiangsu Education Department, the Education Department of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and the Education Bureau of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the East–West Pairing Assistance Collaboration Plan on Artificial Intelligence Vocational Education Task Implementation Conference and AI Enterprises Visiting the West was jointly hosted by the Vocational Colleges Information-based Teaching Steering Committee of the Ministry of Education, Nanjing Vocational College of Information Technology, and Xinjiang Agricultural Vocational and Technical University in Changji, Xinjiang.

With the theme of Joining Hands Between East and West, Intelligent Transformation for the Future - Jointly Building a New Ecosystem for Artificial Intelligence Teaching in Vocational Education, this event brought together forces from education authorities, vocational colleges, and artificial intelligence enterprises. A total of 42 vocational colleges from eastern and western regions and 17 AI enterprises, with more than 130 representatives, attended the conference and conducted in-depth exchanges on topics such as empowering the development of vocational education with artificial intelligence, deepening east–west collaboration, and promoting the co-construction and sharing of high-quality resources.

At the opening ceremony, Wang Junming, director of the Vocational Colleges Information-based Teaching Steering Committee of the Ministry of Education, presided over the meeting. He pointed out that this conference is a further promotion and implementation following the launch of the collaboration plan in January this year. It marks that the collaboration plan has moved from initiative and launch to task implementation and from blueprint design to project delivery.

Zhao Xiangjun, president of NJCIT, spoke on behalf of the organizers and introduced NJCIT's exploration and practice in the field of artificial intelligence. Since the establishment of the School of Artificial Intelligence in 2017, NJCIT has actively advanced professional development, talent cultivation, and reforms in the integration of industry and education, taken the lead in applying for the national higher vocational Artificial Intelligence Technology Application program, and innovatively built an AI Concentric Circles professional cluster model, thereby forming a distinctive profile in its educational practices. Zhao Xiangjun stated that NJCIT will take this event as an opportunity to further expand areas of collaboration, improve cooperation mechanisms, deepen resource sharing, and work with all parties to jointly build a benchmark for east–west collaboration in artificial intelligence vocational education.

During the event, a number of cooperative projects focusing on the actual needs of western vocational colleges were intensively released and implemented. NJCIT's vice president Du Qingbo released an AI intelligent agent for teaching general courses in vocational education, providing a new type of teaching support for vocational colleges to carry out general education in artificial intelligence. Enterprise representatives introduced the implementation pathways and application scenarios of aid projects such as the East–West Shared AI Teaching Supermarket, the Special Program for Empowering Western Universities to Train Seed Teachers in Artificial Intelligence, the Integrated System for Large-model Intelligent Applications, and the AI Class Inspection Platform.

At the meeting, NJCIT, together with Xinjiang Vocational institute of Energy Technology and Suzhou Keda Technology Co., Ltd., jointly unveiled the implementation of the AI Class Inspection Platform; NJCIT jointly established Digital Technology Virtual Simulation Training Bases with Xinjiang Agricultural Vocational and Technical University and Xinjiang Shihezi Vocational Technical College and held unveiling ceremonies, further promoting the extension and coverage of high-quality teaching and training resources to western regions.

Han Xibin, a tenured professor at Tsinghua University, delivered a keynote speech titled Challenges and Countermeasures Facing Vocational Education in the AI Era and conducted an in-depth analysis of the profound impact of artificial intelligence on the concepts, models, and evaluation systems of vocational education. Professor Yang Qianhua from NJCIT gave a special interpretation of the Ministry of Education's Teaching Guidelines for General Artificial Intelligence Courses in Higher Vocational Colleges to provide a reference for vocational colleges in carrying out general education in artificial intelligence.

On the afternoon of June 2, the event featured two sub-forums, namely Exchange on AI-empowered Teaching and Model Class of the AI General Education Course Virtual Teaching and Research Office. Experts and representatives from universities in eastern and western regions and related enterprises engaged in discussions on topics such as talent cultivation in the era of intelligent agents, AI curriculum development, and innovation in teaching methods, shared practical experience, and built consensus on collaboration.

The holding of this event is a concrete action to thoroughly implement the national strategy for the digitalization of vocational education and to promote the high-quality development of vocational education empowered by artificial intelligence, and it is also an important practice of NJCIT in actively serving national strategies and deepening east–west cooperation in vocational education. Next, NJCIT will continue to give full play to its professional strengths and platform functions, work together with relevant units to advance the collaboration plan in depth and in a solid manner, and contribute to building a new ecosystem for artificial intelligence teaching in vocational education and promoting coordinated regional educational development.

Photo/Text by Wang Panpan and Wang Xiaoqiu

Reviewed by Zhu Bin, Party Committee Office · University Office