A global outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic has clouded the world. This seriously hinders economic development, cultural exchanges, and even threatens people's lives and health. Governments around the world actively take effective measures, such as wearing masks, maintaining social distance, and taking nucleic acid tests to effectively reduce the spread of the epidemic and to ensure people's health and safety. However, the epidemic spread quickly, and the impact beyonds the public imagination. As an academic conference, it is important to ensure academic exchange, presentation and dissemination of results, but the health of participants should be placed first. As a result, The 6th ICSSHE conference has changed from the original offline mode to online, with the help of the VOOV meeting platform. These have benefited from our full preparation, so that online meetings are widely recognized and praised by participants and have achieved remarkable results. However, it also poses the shortcomings of the conference on the line, including the difficulty of coordinating the time for participants in different time zones, the instability of some regional networks, and the imperfect function of the online meeting platform.

The 6th International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education (ICSSHE 2020) adopted online mode and was jointly sponsored by Hainan University, Xiamen University Tan Kah Kee College and Sanya University on November 28th, 2020. The theme of ICSSHE this year is: innovation and development in higher education and social sciences. Before that, ICSSHE had been successfully held for five sessions, the first to fourth in Sanya, China, and the fifth in Xiamen, China. It has been praised for their wide academic influence, their flexibility to adapt to hot topics and is increasingly attracting participants from different regions and countries.

ICSSHE 2020 consists of keynote speeches, group photos, video presentations, oral and poster presentations. After the report is completed, there are questions and answers. Each keynote speech takes 50 minutes, with 5 minutes of questions and answers interaction. Prof. Xiaonan Xiao from Xiamen University Tan Kah Kee College made the keynote speech entitled “Intelligent Thinking in the Information Age—Cultivating Innovative Thinking and Ability of College Students”. Prof. Syh-Jong Jang form Center for General Education, Asia University, Taiwan also made the keynote speech with the theme of “Exploring a New Flipped Class Model: A Study of University Courses in Taiwan”. All participants and keynote experts had in-depth exchanges, extensive discussion and benefited a lot. Then, for their own reasons, they who were unable to participate in the online conference made video presentations, and finally are oral and poster presentations. The atmosphere of the whole conference was warm and made a success.

ICSSHE 2020 received more than 400 contributions from over a dozen countries and regions, including Russia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Romania, the Philippines, Hong Kong of China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Palestine and Chinese mainland. It mainly involves the development achievements of higher education and outstanding problems and hot spots in the field of social science. Finally, after strict peer review, 200 articles were included in the proceedings, which are in line with international publishing policy.

Finally, we sincerely thank the organizing committees for their great efforts and the reviewers for their selfless efforts in the review of the article. Again, thank all participating scholars for submitting their outstanding original papers to the conference and actively participating in it. We look forward to your continued attention and participation in ICSSHE 2021.

The conference committee