GEC Culture Story: Looking Back at 2022 & Looking Forward to 2023

At GEC, we held internal review meetings both quarterly and annually to exchange updates on current events and initiatives and find opportunities for improvement with an aim to better support our students, faculty, and staff. At Teaching & Research Center, we deem it particularly essential as we strive to move our company closer to the vision of providing unapparelled opportunities to access the world’s most advanced and rigorous resources to students to help them succeed in academia and their careers. It has also become one of the important dates for team-building activities that are meant for deepening relationships and fostering cooperation among different teams. Besides, as the GEC team expands almost every month, internal review meetings provide an opportunity for introducing new faces in the team.

 

On December 25-28, 2022, all center staff across the country flew to Suzhou, also known as "Venice of the East", where GEC opens its newest regional office, and spent an amazing 3 days in this beautiful city together, sharing and celebrating efforts made in 2022 and taking a look ahead in 2023. 

 

Here is a look at what the Teaching & Research Center of GEC was up to in 2022.

1. More than 1,000 online research programs were offered across all disciplines. GEC also provided over twenty universities with over 200 Open Lecture Talks as well as more than 50 customized programs on STEM, teacher training, and academic writing for undergraduates, graduates, and young teachers.

2. GEC welcomed over 100 new professors to join the network.

3. GEC and the International Competence Development Committee of Chinese Society of Educational Development Strategy has established formal cooperation on international competence development research and course development. We have worked together to design courses focusing on talent cultivation in international competence and built an academic exchange platform. Till now, 40 Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University, China Foreign Affairs University, Nankai University, and Beijing Institute of Technology, have introduced the Global Competence Development courses to their own curriculum and granted credit to students who finished the courses.

4. Despite the pressure caused by the pandemic and currency volatility, GEC successfully made several thousand international payments to our faculties abroad. The busiest months were July, August, and December. To make international payments smoother and faster, GEC has set up more payment centers in Qingdao, Beijing, and Singapore and updated the finance approval process.

 

In the following year, GEC Academy will

1. involve more faculty members from diverse disciplines, and continue our efforts to provide critical information, resources, and support for our faculty, engage respectfully with professors and teaching fellows, listening to their voices through regular Faculty Roundtables and in-person visits (!!!).

2. welcome professors from all over the world to China for teaching and research.

3. continue to design and conduct joint research projects with our faculty and Chinese scholars.

4. explore new forms of cooperation with universities in wider areas, prepare course content in more areas of study, and offer a variety of course delivery formats according to the course goals and student learning objectives.

5. build cooperative Global Competence Centers with higher education institutions, and provide customized global competency training programs by updating course content and developing new seminars to help students increase global mindset capabilities.

6. develop and update the technical and vocational education and training (TVET) curriculum and expand cooperation with enterprises and schools to support young instructors, professors, professionals, and students with adequate and proper training. 

7. expand institutional collaborations with universities, schools, and research centers, not only in the US and the UK, but also in other parts of the world, including the EU, Asia-Pacific, and more.

2022 was an exceptional year of growth for GEC. We are energized by the progress we have made and the momentum we have built and appreciate all our faculty and staff’s tremendous contributions. As we look forward to the year 2023, we believe, with an open-minded, supportive, and creative mindset as well as abundant passion and commitment, we will accomplish greater things together.