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Vol.8, No.2, 2021 1145 

 

 

 

 

A Comparative Analysis of Large-scale Online 

Education between Urban and Rural K-12 Schools 

in China during the COVID-19 

By Hu, Y., Nie, J., & Gu, X. 
Correspondence to: Hu, Y., Department of Education Information Technology, 

East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, 200062. Email: 

ylhu@deit.ecnu.edu.cn  

PON the emergency of the COVID-19, the unconventional mode of 

pandemic-battle has been adopted around China. According to the In-

formation Technology Education Subcommittee of the Chinese Society of 

Education, the researchers conducted an investigation on the online teaching 

situation of primary and secondary schools during the epidemic in China. On 

the basis of questionnaire inquiry and interview, the researchers designed 

questionnaires respectively to collect data of the personnel within the basic 

education, including the principals, teachers, and students under the situation 

of “School’s out, but Class’s on”. Through the SPSS 22.0, the researchers 

preprocessed the collected data and then using the descriptive statistics ana-

lyzed the present situation of online teaching, so as to compare the results 

with the variation analysis of the rural-urban differences. The research results 

show that: 

 Among all participant schools, 89.8% of them have conducted the 

online teaching of all the curriculum, except courses like P.E., or 

Art cannot be taught online due to the unsuitable learning meth-

ods or lacking the corresponding platform. 

 The chi-square test was adopted to examine whether urban or ru-

ral schools have the basic conditions for online learning. The re-

sults show that there are still significant differences in basic 

hardware conditions, network conditions, and venue conditions 

between urban and rural students. Judging from the existing prob-

lems, it is concluded that equality of opportunity has not been 

achieved yet. There are also certain differences in the proportion 

of time spent on organizing online teaching in urban and rural 

schools. Although both urban and rural schools mainly adopt 

online live broadcasts and online discussions between teachers 

and students during the epidemic, the two types of teaching are 

different in emphasis. Urban schools spend a larger proportion of 

U 

mailto:ylhu@deit.ecnu.edu.cn


 

Vol.8, No.2, 2021 1146 

time online lessons, while rural schools tend to concentrate on the 

online discussions between teachers and students. Although 

schools in different areas have organized the collective prepara-

tion for the lesson, there is a certain gap in the focus and imple-

mentation of rural schools in curriculum resource construction, 

ICT strategies, and teaching design in the process of lesson prepa-

ration compared with urban schools. 

 Statistics show that in terms of financial support, there is a gap 

between rural schools and urban schools. As for the other safe-

guards measures, the degree of humanistic care and institutional 

support of urban and rural schools are both relatively high. 

 Compared with students in urban schools, students in rural 

schools have higher self-reported scores on learning effects and 

interests, especially on the aspect of the effects of interaction with 

classmates and online learning motivation in the online learning 

process, also they are better in self-perception. 

 The information technology literacy of urban school students 

scored higher than that of rural school students. A further T-test 

was conducted on the difference in information technology litera-

cy, and a significant difference was found. Students in rural 

schools are up against more technical difficulties in the process of 

online learning, and the mastery degree of them in new technolo-

gies compared with students in urban areas. About mental health, 

urban school students scored higher in mental health than rural 

school students. The T-test of urban and rural school students 

showed that there are significant differences in the mental health 

of urban and rural school students. This difference is reflected in 

the family-supportive environment and the safeguard measures 

provided by the school. Compared with rural school students, ur-

ban school students have better family support and timely psycho-

logical, academic, and technical assistance from the school. 

Therefore, from the perspective of providing “fair and quality” 

teaching and learning, on the one hand, it is necessary to reconstruct 

the way of resource organization and optimize the ecology of rural 

teachers’ professional development. On the other hand, it is necessary 

to cultivate students’ digital resilience and provide high-quality plat-

forms and resources to serve lifelong learning. 

 

Source: Distance Education in China, 2021; 2021(05):13-21+76-77. 

 

 

 

 
 

 


