Online education product success or failure: What factors may be "a foot of the land"

Absrtact: Lately I've been thinking about why there are a lot of good online education products that seem to be a great idea, and they're not as disruptive to traditional offline education as they really are, and in many cases they're not even reaching their desired

Lately I've been thinking about why a lot of it seems like a great idea, the product's great online education products are often not as disruptive as the traditional offline education model, and in many cases they die early before they reach the desired user community. Here, perhaps you will quickly think of Gong's ladder net, which once wanted to build a closed loop around students, parents and teachers to do the online education products, now for a variety of reasons for the dismal ending. There are many such examples, ladder nets are just one.

Recently, in foreign attention online education Products Web site Edsurge published a title "5 reasons Why great EdTech product Don ' t Succeed" article. In this article, Colette Coleman, a former teacher, online education product sales and marketing advisor, stands from her point of view, offering five reasons why some ideas are awesome, products that are great online education products cannot be successful:

Teachers are busy (teacher is busy); No educator works in a bubble (no educators want multithreading); Many Teachers are resistant to Marvell in misspelling Classrooms (many teachers have resistance to the use of technical products in the classroom); At this point, EdTech product have become ubiquitous (now, online education market is too prosperous, all kinds of products everywhere); President the closing of the Marvell Gap, but it's not closed verb (Obama seeks to eliminate unfair distribution of educational resources, but the gap persists).

Although these reasons are only "opinion", they do tell us one thing and provide a reference for entrepreneurs in the online education field in China. So, if these reasons can lead to the failure of online education products, what kind of online education products might have a chance to succeed?

1. Aim for just need

Entrepreneurs must be sure of a promising direction when choosing the direction of entrepreneurship in the online education field. In the process of choosing the direction, according to the needs of their own students to judge the product. Although this point of departure is not wrong, it must be noted that although each of us once had the identity of students, but this will lead to our often easy to start in the process of making a mistake: we think we have a very good understanding of user needs.

In fact, many entrepreneurs ' ideas actually don't really hit the user's pain point. The children are not interested in the course content, OK! Do a game, put the content into it! Teachers want a better sense of participation in the classroom presentation, good! Do a lesson video sharing platform! There is too much paper work, good! Do a product to put these homework in the clouds! These product ideas are not wrong, but is really the current students and teachers need it? And whether this need is just a product can be a broad success of the most important measurement standards, if only the product is good, but can not let students and teachers have the desire, have the ability, have time to adopt, then the product itself is still a "failure".

2. Lightweight Products

In fact, for teachers, they are not expected to be very cool or revolutionary products. For them, a very attractive product is really able to increase the teacher's control of the classroom, for each student to develop personalized programs. And even if we can achieve this goal, the product must be really able to save time for teachers and improve their quality of life. For an experienced teacher, their past experience has enabled them to face lesson preparation and classroom teaching, they do not need a time-consuming and laborious thing to cater to the students too much, must find a good balance in the teacher's pay and harvest. From this perspective, we believe that the future of online education in the field of products must be lightweight.

3. Product uniqueness + an effective channel promotion

We found that the market on the homogenization of many products, students and teachers will be from a variety of channels to obtain a lot of products, free invitation code, MOOC site has more than shell, classes, NetEase Open Class, Nutshell Mu class. This leads to two problems:

1 A new product is very easy to ignore.

2 product too much, customer loyalty how to guarantee. Just a "passer-by"?

In the field of traditional education, we found that for teachers this group, their use of a new online education products are often from their own trust or respected practitioners in the industry recommended, and for students, this is also a very important factor. Therefore, an important channel for the success of online education is to be able to be used by a small number of users in the industry with certain influence, for teachers, may be star teachers, for students, may be those Couba.

Sure, who doesn't want to emulate?

Whether the products are excellent or not is in line with the two points mentioned above will become a critical factor for these products to be accepted quickly by this group of high quality users and promoted through Word-of-mouth dissemination.

4. Long-term vision, the future is a generation with technology growth

Speaking here, we do not think that the current online education field does not need cool, subversive products, on the contrary, we are more than anyone want to the birth of such a product, we call on entrepreneurs in the field of online education to explore a truly revolutionary products.

The idea is very simple, because in the long run, there is a strong demand for online education products to see the future, the core goal we focus on is children, they are our future. If we can predict our future at this time, then what is the reason for us not to develop a forward-looking product, because the user itself is the generation with technology growth? Just like now, we know that this is the era of mobile internet, the future may be intelligent hardware, the era of internet things, what reason do we not go to spend a lot of effort to do this research and development?

I have to say, online education, a long way to go. We also need time, but also need more to pay, to really find teachers, students the deepest needs, to design more meaningful and visionary products. Whatever the outcome, these efforts to become a better, better path are worth affirming. Both down-to-earth, but also to look to the stars, and online education in the field of entrepreneurship on the road of small partners, mutual encouragement!