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The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 had far-reaching consequences on public health and the well-being of millions of individuals worldwide. Governments worldwide implemented various measures to mitigate the spread of the virus, leading to significant disruptions in various sectors, including education. In many countries, mandatory lockdowns rendered face-to-face instruction in educational institutions impossible, promoting distance learning as a practical substitute for traditional classroom education, particularly in universities.
In 2019, the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of of China approved the implementation of the Double Ten Thousand Plan or the Gold Course Construction Plan in all colleges and universities across the country. This initiative aimed to develop 10,000 national first-class courses and 10,000 provincial first-class courses, with 3,000 online “gold courses” and 7,000 blended “gold courses” (offline and online) (Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, 2019). The creation of the third batch of national first-class courses has already begun. The COVID-19 pandemic affected the regular opening of classrooms and traditional in-person teaching in colleges and universities. To address this, the Ministry of Education recommended that institutions make use of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and high-quality online course teaching resources at the provincial and school levels. With the aid of experimental resource platforms and various online course platforms at all levels, as well as on-campus online learning spaces, online learning and teaching must be actively carried out to ensure teaching progress and quality during the epidemic prevention and control period. This helps in achieving the objective of suspending classes without stopping teaching and learning. Additionally, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2020) recommended 22 online course platforms that could support online teaching services in colleges and universities during the epidemic prevention and control period, such as Icourse Network, Wisdom Tree, and Superstar Learning. Driven by the Ministry of Education, online courses in higher education have rapidly developed. Different colleges and universities have established online courses with unique features on network platforms, leading to an increase in online curriculum teaching.
In April 2022, EDUCAUSE, which is the U.S. higher education informatization association, released the 2022 Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition (Pelletier et al., 2022), which identifies hybrid and online learning, learning analytics, and big data as the future of higher education. According to Long and Siemens (2011), big data and its analytics have become the most significant factors influencing the future of higher education. The rapid development of online curriculum teaching in Chinese colleges and universities after the epidemic has also provided an opportunity for big data research on users’ education on major online platforms. Statistics show that, in China’s colleges and universities at all levels, the number of students reached tens of millions. Online teaching in the teaching platform has left a vast amount of teaching data. In the network teaching environment, mining the big data of teachers’ and students’ teaching and learning on the platform will help to find the characteristics of teachers’ and students’ behaviors and their changing rules, providing theoretical support for education administrators in colleges and universities to improve their teaching decisions, optimize resource allocation, and change higher education teaching. The majority of extant studies on online teaching behavior are focused on students and their various online learning behaviors and activities. However, there has been limited research on teaching behavior from the perspective of instructors, specifically through the collection and analysis of substantial amounts of online teaching data (Zhang et al., 2021). In this study, the authors investigated the teaching behavior of teachers in a university in East China, analyzed the data of teachers’ generative teaching on the online course teaching platform, and discussed the characteristics of teachers’ online teaching behavior, in order to improve the teaching quality of higher education and promote the reform of the higher education model.