BEIJING, March 16 (Xinhua) -- The following are the highlights of China's key education news from the past week:

-- Ministry of Education said that it would promote the digitization of vocational education, higher education and continuing education resources.

The ministry will build a database for vocational education resources in 2019 and push for the sharing of quality vocational education resources. It will also complete the certification of 800 national-level online university courses that are open to the public.

-- China will push for Artificial AI courses to be offered at primary and secondary schools and popularize programming education in steps.

Big data, virtual reality and AI technologies should be more deeply applied to education and teaching.

-- A total of 43.9 million college students in China received financial support in 2018.

About 9.2 million students were awarded a total of 25 billion yuan (3.7 billion U.S. dollars) worth of scholarships last year. Financial aid worth 32.8 billion yuan and student loans worth 32.6 billion went to 9.7 million students and 4.5 million students, respectively.

-- A full review of mobile apps used by schools will be conducted to ensure they are free of harmful content.

Local education departments were urged to work out regulations of the utilization and development of mobile apps intended for schools.