Author(s)

Chunyu Li ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ College of Teacher Education, Qujing Normal University, Qujing, 655011, Yunnan, China

Corresponding Author

Chunyu Li

ABSTRACT

China's National Smart Education Platform for Primary and Secondary Schools gives teachers nationwide access to publicly funded basic-education resources. In practice, however, it is only one part of a wider resource environment that also includes textbooks, commercial repositories, professional literature, social media, school systems, colleagues' materials, and generative AI. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nine teachers and one teaching-research officer in Yunnan, this exploratory qualitative study asks what the National Platform is actually used for within that wider ecology and where its practical limits emerge. Thematic analysis and cross-case comparison identified five recurring functions: authoritative curriculum and instructional reference; lesson observation and professional learning; foundational support for lesson preparation; support for demanding or unfamiliar tasks; and organized professional-development and public-service provision. The weight of these functions changed with the task, teachers’ experience, subject area, and organizational setting. Resources were more likely to enter practice when they fitted students and local conditions, could be edited and moved through familiar workflows, and did not impose excessive time costs. Teachers dealt with mismatches by using resources directly, extracting selected elements, adapting them, combining several sources, or substituting another tool. These findings indicate that the National Platform is better judged by the professional functions it performs and by the conditions under which those functions become usable than by frequency of use alone. They also point to a mediating role for regional teaching-research systems between national provision and local classrooms.

KEYWORDS

National Smart Education Platform for Primary and Secondary Schools; Teachers' digital resource ecosystems; Resource use; Yunnan

CITE THIS PAPER

Chunyu Li. Roles and Practical Boundaries of the National Smart Education Platform for Primary and Secondary Schools in Teachers' Digital Resource Ecosystems: A Qualitative Study in Yunnan, China. Curriculum and Teaching Methodology (2026). Vol. 9, No. 5, 9-18. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/curtm.2026.090502.

REFERENCES

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