10 points of online education close observation: utilitarian has to come first

Zhang diou, CEO of online school network

Online education is becoming a hot topic in the field of entrepreneurship. Read the opinions of all parties and most of the topics are focused onMacro trends and foreign success modelsBut there is little discussion about the first-line online education situation in China. Due to the operation of the online school network, my work needs to be oriented to students of various online schools and hundreds of subjects in China. Therefore, I have accumulated some observations at the practical level, and my views are not correct or profound, power should contribute some resources for discussion.

Big Environment

1. Whether online education can replace traditional education is a false proposition.This is an old topic and a pseudo proposition. I have participated in a detailed discussion on this topic, but I suddenly found that the debate on this topic is meaningless in practice. As in historyMentoring Education evolved into private school education, and then to large class educationDevelopment experience,The educational model is weakening the individual's teaching results, but its development meets the needs of educational efficiency and standardization.. This is also true for online education. It is only an auxiliary means to improve educational efficiency and is not in conflict with traditional education. For users, this is similar to the difference between people who need fast food to go to McDonald's and those who love food to eat Quanjude.

2. Unlike a decade ago, the big environment of online education has indeed arrived.The popularization of Internet lifestyle, the large-scale acceleration of household networks, the rise of consumer groups in the 90 s, and the maturity of the online payment environment have all provided a good background for online education. More importantly, the pace of work for young people increases, the cost of living increases, and the occupation competition increases, which further increases the public demand for offline education. The former is a necessary condition, and the latter is a result of demand. Therefore, the opportunities for online education are definitely different from those of ten years ago. In this regard, we can say that the spring breeze of online education has indeed come.

3. Online education abroad and in China may not be the same thing at all.Different social systems, different educational environments, different public life pressures, and different public learning objectives are collectively referred to as "you know" differences, this makes offline traditional education different. Therefore, foreign Khan schools, lynda.com, and Coursera do not necessarily apply in China. In ChinaOnline accounting training can support the IPO of ncpis in the New York Stock Exchange. Relying on the secondary education training, there will be n large organizations that are doing well.Is there any analogy abroad, and I still don't know.

But one thing is certain, in a society where the basic needs of the public, such as housing, medical care, and education, are not fully guaranteed, the life pressure and increasing popularity of young people, and the development of the workplace is the only way out for most people to survive, when the idea of "Achieving ideals in Education" is transformed into "changing fate in education,Non-utilitarian education is far less practical than utilitarian training.. Therefore, this helpless situation is doomed to completely different educational environments and business opportunities. Rather than analyzing the business model of open classes in prestigious schools and the development direction of online education abroad, it is better to analyze what kind of online education can help Chinese people quickly achieve their goals on the horizon.

4. The three sections may be half closest to entrepreneurs.The most exciting thing about online education is the imagination. However, the reality is thatIn the Chinese market, only three sections are available for income, namely adult training, K12 (from kindergarten to the 12th grade, collectively referred to as the basic education stage), supplementary education and academic education.. Many imagine that the "online payment sharing skills", or the fourth largest block for pure knowledge-based and interest-oriented products do not exist, because the public has no learning habit of paying for non-utilitarian purposes, there have already been failure cases.

In the three major sections, academic education comes from schools in the system, and online courses in the system are linked with academic qualifications, which is hard to touch. I believe this sector will certainly give birth to several profitable companies, but these companies are not in our scope of discussion. K12-oriented online education is constantly under debate due to the self-control factors of primary and middle school students. The pursuit of brands by users has led to a majority of such institutions as xueersi. However, entrepreneurs can still do this in product innovation and second-tier cities.ArticleTherefore, at least half of this sector is open to entrepreneurs. Fortunately, the space in the adult education field is still sufficient. As long as the big environment of training research remains unchanged, a large number of new students surge every year in this field. In this direction, there are still some in-depth information available for the language, foreign trade, construction, and finance sectors.

About Industry

5. The competition for online education in the future must be the competition for product experience.For the industry, existing offline education has completed the basic layout of various training directions. As discussed above, online education, as a teaching tool, plays a role in improving the efficiency of old education models. If the market has a need for online education, it is also a need for the Internet of offline courses. Therefore, innovation is important. How to convert offline education into effective online courses and how to improve the effect of online teaching will be a competitive point in the future.

In reality, the popular online education mode is video playback. Although this mode has its own advantages, people in the industry have realized that video playback alone lacks interaction and it is difficult to better simulate the real teaching process and learning atmosphere. From the Internet UE and technology perspective, re-design and implementation of the teaching platform, this is not very difficult for Internet product entrepreneurs. Therefore, the ability to effectively transform mature offline courses into mature online courses is the strength of entrepreneurs and a competitive opportunity between emerging online education institutions and traditional institutions.

6. The essence of online education is education, and the key lies in the Internet.As an education industry, the content and essence of its service lies in the teaching ability, which is beyond doubt. However, the author believes that the key lies in the Internet capabilities of enterprises. Let's make a pure logical derivation, that is, if the key to Internet education lies in education, why are there not many online education giants among many education and training Enterprises in China. We can see that the lack of Internet experience has always been an important issue that has plagued the development of this field.

The essence of education products is services, and the essence of the Internet is services. But the key is that the Internet is the first window of service. If there is no good Internet experience, even the best educational services cannot be delivered to users. In turn, as long as any online education institution was established, as long as it was not based on the general idea, it would certainly have its own teaching organization, Teaching Method Research and teacher preparation. Even if these capabilities are not yet mature, but with a good Internet experience, we can make up for the temporary shortcomings through services, and strive for time for the maturity of teaching capabilities. Therefore, from the perspective of actual industry practice, we can naturally draw a conclusion that online education entrepreneurship and industry development should begin with improving Internet capabilities.

7. When the spring breeze comes, you have to rely on yourself to sprout.Let's talk about it first. We can see that the page design of the website of a large online education institution is still in the web1.0 era. Nine people will be dazzled when ten users enter the website. Online School-only customer service often asks users for help to complete the registration and course selection process at the online school. If some of the students looking for learning courses leave because of eye pain, some lose the patience of course selection because of the chaotic course schedule, and some shake the confidence in the service because of the poor product experience, it is hard to say that the market space for online education is not large enough. E-commerce or Weibo can profoundly influence public life. In addition to the big environment, it also relies on the internal strength of the operating company to cultivate and create the market. Even insiders admitted that the Internet level in the education industry in China is generally low. It is indeed too early to deny the prospect of online education in this industry. Therefore, we should be cautious about whether or not the spring of online education is coming, whether from multiple parties or empty parties. Whether the spring of the industry is coming or not depends on how enterprises in the industry do it.

Micro View

8. A journey of thousands of miles begins with Seo.Similar to other popular internet models, online education faces the same fierce competition in marketing, but the difference is fierce. E-commerce and other life services are oriented to the public, while education and training are oriented to the small public. On Weibo, a piece of "cosmetic discounts" message is sent. All female readers are potential users. However, if an "IELTS training" message is sent on Weibo, it may be difficult to find the objects to be pushed in batches. At the same time, few organizations are able to own brand drivers such as New Oriental, global, and chinacache. Therefore, the promotion is more dependent on the matching of users' spontaneous needs. Without seeing anyone, search for a subject. Baidu's promotion links account for more than half of the homepage. Such paid clicks are not affordable for entrepreneurial enterprises. Therefore, from the perspective of practice, the difficulty of online education organizations should not be underestimated. The difficulty of marketing is not the competition for creativity, but the competition for promotion channels. Start with Seo. No matter how slow the effect is, whether there are other amazing promotion methods, the dependence on search engines in the education and training field will always be the foundation, whether you believe it or not, I believe it.

9. A good teacher needs to be redefined.The teacher issue is of course the core of online education, and "the teacher who answers questions is a good teacher" is not in our discussion. A good teacher in general sense may not be a favorite teacher in online education, because of the situation of "Dizzy camera. Teachers face students online and interact with each other and have an emotional experience. In the online world, teachers face the spotlight, cameras, and various Internet tools. Estimate how many teachers with teaching experience can have these experiences, be proficient in operating the network, and be able to talk in the camera, moreover, users in different regions can hear their accents. If you only talk about these points, it is really not as good as the ordinary network host.

Is this the difficulty of online education? I think this may be an opportunity, because online education institutions may not have to compete for limited resources of famous teachers. They only need the teaching plans and Q & A support of famous teachers, and others should be handed over to teaching assistants with experience in network hosting, therefore, we may have a lot of space to explore.

10. Online Education platforms.It is indeed an exciting idea to provide a platform for teachers to freely record online courses and share paid knowledge. However, this era is far from reaching. The above-mentioned user payment mentality is an important reason. In addition, even if you provide utilitarian examination courses and grasp the social credit environment and quality of teaching, this is a problem that cannot be solved temporarily. More importantly, the public has a large number of learning points and it is difficult to effectively organize the learning points to form a scale. As a result, there was a deadlock that the stalls were too big to be promoted, and the stalls were too small to be profitable. The reason for talking about this is that we have recently heard about the idea of new entrepreneurs. I would like to tell entrepreneurs with these ideals that this direction may have a broad future, but it should be a restricted area now. unless there is a strong background for investment support, it is difficult to reach the other side of happiness. The online school network is an example. It is also a platform. The reason for choosing a "seemingly earthy" entry point to organize existing online education institution resources is also that the problem is solved first. Of course, this is only a path for the development of the network, which is not discussed in this article.

Based on the above points, let's go back to the topic "is the spring of online education coming?". I want to draw a conclusion from the perspective of the online school network: "The spring breeze has actually arrived, but it depends on the seeds to sprout ".