(Photo: Souhu.)

China is using livestream technology to close the education gap between urban and rural areas, with teachers from Chengdu No.7 High School in Southwest China's Sichuan Province teaching and students in 248 high schools in poverty-stricken areas attending remotely.
The report, first published by China Youth Daily's Wechat account on Thursday which said that livestreams can change the fate of students, went viral, with a related hashtag viewed 82 million times and reposted 27,000 times on Sina Weibo, China's twitter-like social media platform as of press time.
While some people agreed that the method provides high quality education resources to students who might not be able to otherwise have access, others said live-streamed classes have a limited effect on a student and such technology is too much for some rural schools to afford.
Some 72,000 students finished their high school via the livestream classes in the past 16 years, with most of them going to college and 88 of them attending Peking University and Tsinghua University, China's top universities, it reported, noting the success the model enjoyed in comparison to the old model, in which better teachers and students went to bigger cities and only a few students attended college.
Close to 80,000 students take daily remote classes via livestreams from Chengdu No.7 High School, the Chengdu Education Bureau said.
However, Chinese education experts and many netizens questioned the method.
Chu Zhaohui, a research fellow at the Beijing-based National Institute of Education Sciences, told the Global Times that livestreamed classes only help students learn but do not develop their character.
Having students attend livestreamed classes will make local teachers passive, which would further worsen their teaching abilities and damage students' character development, Chu warned.
Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the Shanghai-based 21st Century Education Research Institute, told the Global Times on Sunday that the key to balancing the urban and rural education is to invest in teacher development in rural areas.
The fact that students performed better in national college entrance examinations should not only be credited to the livestreamed classes but also, and maybe even more importantly, to the national program that provides poor rural students a chance to access top universities, Xiong said.
A Beijing News' commentary on Thursday said Luquan county in Hebei Province is a special case where the local government pours a lot into education to meet the demand of the livestream, which is not representative of rural areas.
A student going by xiaotongxue online, who have graduated from the livestreamed class of Luquan No.1 Middle School and now attends East China Normal University, said the method has deeply influenced him by improving his school performance and expanding his horizons.