2014 China Online Education Research Report

These two years, online education market lively, but also is a smoke and mirrors. Reporter friends have been asking me how the Internet will change education? This tradition can no longer be the traditional industry. To tell the truth, no one knows.

From the first Youdao internal discussion online education, to this April Ding lei in Beijing officially launched an online education platform, and then to now the beginning of the school, three years have passed. I think, after this period of exploration, I can answer this question a little bit. So, at today's Internet conference, I made a speech titled "The Iceberg of online education."

The reason for this title is that the online education market and iceberg have very similar characteristics. First, the volume is very large; second, there are strong inertia, it is difficult to change; its third, most appropriate and most important, the iceberg has 90% of the volume is hidden under the water, the online education market is the same, there are a lot of user demand has not been met, there is a huge potential market waiting to be excavated. To do well in this market, you need to look at the water, not the water.

Today, online education, although much attention, but still in the embryonic stage, everyone will be curious, what kind of product form can go farther?

If according to genetics and birth, I think the current online education product model can be divided into four categories: traditional education institutions, vertical education services, community and tools, and education platform, two dimensions: more education resources advantage, or flow advantage.

In the first category, the problem that traditional institutions face is how to solve the problem of online and offline games. Its disadvantage is the lack of Internet products to build capacity, and the advantage is the brand and content. By analogy with the already highly internet retailing industry, the problems faced by traditional educational institutions are similar to those of Suning and Gome.

The second category, vertical education service agencies need and offline agencies PK education content and services, so how to create a differentiated content production model is the key, but also very test brand promotion ability. Say millet, we may be easier to understand. How to do the education of millet is a vertical educational service institutions need to consider things.

The third category is an online education product that started out as a community or tool. The biggest advantage of such companies is that they can use tools or community-built mass user groups to develop educational products. To Youdao dictionary For example, currently has 430 million of the total user, 60 million of the month active users. This is the "content + community + trade" vertical industry model mentioned by Queen Mary Meeker of the Internet.

Finally, it is purely platform. Before 2012, there were small companies with such a product model, but 2012 years later, after internet giants entered the online education, few such startups appeared. The reason is obvious, the most important platform is traffic, small companies and large companies can not match, from the soup. Perhaps for such small companies, to enter the threshold high, the Giants are not too busy to take into account the subdivision of the field, the formation of a unique user base, can survive. For example, to create a education of the only product will be.

Whatever the pattern, in the two years, online educators have experimented with attempts to open up online education markets and uncover their true colours.

I've summed up five trends, about geography, price positioning, learning experience, and online education at the mobile end, and finally how to achieve the results of online education.

1. Geographically, I think there are great opportunities for the three-tier and following cities.

I simply take Youdao dictionary users as an example. In the past year or so, even though the number of first-and second-tier urban users accounted for most of it, the proportion was shrinking, and the proportion of the three-line and following cities was increasing. In other words, the one or two-line capital has a slight advantage over the city, but the three or four-line city is a very large incremental market.

At the same time, we found in the user survey, the three or four-line city users of their demand for teaching resources more urgent, because the teaching resources there is weaker, and online education does not have the geographical constraints. To be true to the big talk, online education can realize the democratization of education.

2. Price positioning, mainstream online education product positioning will tend to a high cost performance. From actual sales, we found that more lightweight (shorter class hours) courses, pro-test content, and more pervasive courses (not for exams, and for individual promotion lectures) are more likely to be welcomed. The common feature of such courses is the wide range of people, at the same time cost-effective.

3. Learning experience, online education will not be worse than offline education, but there will be more innovation. There are many questions about the learning experience of online education. There is a fairly common view that online learning, because it is remote and not face-to-face, so the learning experience will always be weaker than offline teaching, however, after a period of practice, we find that this view is not correct. There is no inevitable relationship between learning experience and line online. The key issue here is how to use the methodology of Internet products, constantly create product innovation, so that more users immersed in online education. For example, the recent very popular live lesson products, Youdao series of live courses, the average user completion rate reached 80%. In the online education industry, friends should understand that this number is actually quite high, and that the recorded course is far below the figure, often under 50% or even 20% or 10%.

4. Mobile learning will explode. What role does mobile phones play in online education as a terminal with the largest user base? has been controversial. My point is that mobile learning is not a complement but a mainstream one. Youdao provided by the bilingual reading articles, the mobile end and the overall PC end user volume, the mobile end of the reading volume is 10 times times the PC side. According to the data released by Youku potatoes, video web site mobile traffic accounted for a sharp rise in the ratio, already close to 70%. I believe that with this group of users growing up in the mobile Internet environment, online education can also develop more and more product forms on the mobile side.

5. To improve the learning effect is the ultimate goal of online education, and to achieve this goal, it is inevitable that the whole process of education online, including teaching, learning, testing, training and other links. This is an increasingly obvious trend over the past two years and is the basis for the formation of business models. Domestic users do not have the habit of paying for online video, but he will pay for the whole service. In product operations, we found that the user is very satisfied with these services, we use a net recommended value (NPS) indicators to measure a product, found that the way to pay online education products, the average NPS value is 60%, what does this mean? Generally speaking, the product that achieves 30% is already the user quite recommend.

After sharing so much, I would like to say that the iceberg of online education, though hidden deep, is not so mysterious. I believe that it is also clear that the new round of online education products can revolutionize the education market over the next two or three years.

Natural, Youdao hope to become a catalyst for change.

From: NetEase Zhou Feng

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)