The first round of exchange for the online education industry has reached

Absrtact: When I remember the year when I summed up the industry trend of online education at the end of last year, my title was: Internet people are beginning to reach out to the education industry. But now that the three-quarter past, and then the online education industry, will find that great changes have been made to the proven

I remember the headline of the year when I summed up the industry trend of online education at the end of last year: Internet people are beginning to reach out to the education industry. But now, three quarters past, and then review the online education industry, will find that the great changes have been formed-those who have been proven model good companies have entered the B-round, C-round, and the model is not reliable, can not rise up the company are falling down, the first round of exchange has reached.

After talking to some entrepreneurs and investors, my own judgment is that the first wave of entrepreneurship in the online education industry is maturing-proving that a workable model works well, but it also means that the market space for such products is occupied and others are better off. And while there are some areas where startups have been shown to shrink, I think there is still a lot of valuable, but not many, areas that deserve more people to explore and even dig.

So this article begins with a summary of the trends in online education in the first to third quarter of this year, which companies have risen so much and which have not had much of an opportunity. It will then look into areas of the future where new opportunities may emerge and what qualities these need to have. If you are doing the same direction as I expected, welcome mail contact me: yl [at] 36kr.com, of course, this article will also have a professional, if you find anything wrong or different points of view, also welcome to email exchange at any time.

Well, here's the first part: the market that will be harder to access in the future

K12 Class-

1. Question Bank

Generally speaking, the children's study in the K12 stage is divided into three aspects: classroom study, homework/practice, test evaluation. And after class homework/practice this ring, is undoubtedly the best understanding of what students learn in the classroom have mastered, which knowledge is still weak, still need to continue to learn a link, if you have the national students of this data, the future of the imagination space is undoubtedly very large.

However, the field has been working hard since last September, when the Monkey Bank (previously reported) this July, the ape bank also announced the 15 million dollars in the C round of financing, in addition to happiness, the network, easy questions, such as several a-wheel company in which, after the entry may be difficult to break the users of these companies and capital barriers.

Take the ape. A company, since last September, when it decided to turn to K12 and launch the university Entrance Examination questions, its team found that secondary school students have more mobile devices and use frequency than they expected, and this bold decision to adopt a free strategy to obtain a larger number of users. Last week, the ape bank announced that its users have broken 5 million, and its recent introduction of the junior middle School Exercise Library, is to occupy a larger, tens of thousands of users of the level of the junior high school market. And the ape Question Bank COO Conco also in a private chat communication mentioned that the ape question bank will be in the field of homework/test practice enough to become a platform, but also may access teachers and other services. So at this stage also want to from a single dimension of the test questions or similar mode to enter the K12 market entrepreneurs, estimated need to think about whether they have enough advantages and early players race.

2. Photo Answering

Job-Answering is the way to approach "practice after class" from another angle.

March this year, we reported the first technology to do the answer to the product Couba June, after this, similar products continue to emerge, let me even doubt, why so many entrepreneurs choose this market into?

Then I clarified the logic: solve the problem that the job won't write, it is the first need of junior high school students, and it is difficult for them to solve all the problems by asking for help from the students online (one if the problem is too much will be embarrassed to ask students, and the two students in many grades are not very good at asking questions). One of the advantages of Internet products is the "fast and efficient", students can be in the Answer class app quickly search questions, to get the answers to the problem and resolution.

Since such products are in a quick word, it is a purely technical way to do the photo-recognition-match-give the answer, it is more efficient than getting a student to ask questions, distributing the topic to the teacher in the background, giving the teacher a manual answer, or building a UGC community to answer each other. Once the efficient solution and strong demand matching, then a product will be easy to obtain the number of users of high-speed growth, thereby through high user volume to exchange for a single point of breakthrough.

This is why the two companies representing the former technology Couba June and learning Treasure (of course, also in the Avan and other products) can easily obtain millions or even tens users, and even in the latter model of the company also has such as Baidu job help, and get the IDG investment love koala such heavyweight players.

So why is it impossible to get into the field right now? First of all, Couba June before the product on line has a year or so of technical preparation time, even then appear in the public view of the study treasure, Avan issues such as the team in fact, before the line is also prepared for half a year or even longer, especially the founder of the study treasure has 7 years of image recognition technology accumulation, So to achieve a higher technological breakthrough in this type of model, I am afraid it is not easy for the entrepreneurs who want to enter the new field. In addition, Couba June in March this year to harvest the Temasek Group's peak investment in the 5 million dollar a round of financing, learn treasure also just started to get the Jinsha River 3 million dollar a round of financing, at this moment, two companies should be through the promotion of capital in technology and the market has grown a lot. Therefore, the flooded area of answering questions is not a good entrepreneurial choice.

Of course, the previous model has been criticized will become a student copying homework accomplices, but I think an entrepreneur said before is very right: in fact, students to ask the teacher questions got the answer is not copy homework? In fact, the essence is the same, is to tell the students the answer. But the reason why we do not take this as a copy of homework, is because the teacher will have guidance and explain the answer to the students, so long as such products can be completed to explain and guide this link can be. So this kind of product needs to be combined with some teachers ' platforms, and that's another area that we're going to be talking about now that the "little giant" occupies.

3, find the teacher platform

One of the things that this year's online education entrepreneur wants to understand more and more is that education is essentially a service, putting content on the line for free access, and indeed changing the way in which knowledge is gained in the past, but education is more of a service that still needs a teacher to do. This is why this year the online education sector to find a teacher's platform began to rise, because the teacher is the last closed loop of a link, and service is to reach the end of the transaction.

Looking at, as I see, this year, the education field to find a teacher platform has instaedu mode (such as good nets, interesting search nets, etc.), wyzant mode (such as 365 good teachers), and do wyzant+instaedu mode of breakthrough interaction, with WHO to learn and other companies. Break through the interaction and learn from who is the first two patterns of the sum, they not only allow teachers to online through the electronic whiteboard for one-on-one teaching, but also allow students to parents on the platform and the teacher appointment time, online under the completion of face-to-face, personally think that this is completed knowledge acquisition, troubleshooting and offline services such as line under the online closed loop.

So why is it not so good in this field now? Mainly flow and capital reasons. Breakthrough interaction at the beginning of the establishment of a public company to obtain investment, you can import the required traffic for it, and who to learn is more because Chen Xiangdong's former CEO of the New Oriental Group was awarded a large angel investment at the start of the venture, according to industry rumors that its valuation is now at $250 million trillion. Therefore, although the provision of teacher service is a very good closed-loop and realizable way, but now to set up from zero such a platform, I am afraid there is a certain degree of difficulty.

Professional exam-Professional IT online education

It training is almost invariably the preferred area of online education for entrepreneurs, because the target group in this field is willing to pay, the ability to pay is strong and the payers are the same as the service consumers, this is very different from the K12 and the Consumer users (students) in the field of early education.

There are three types of online education that can be subdivided first, the introduction/interest stage, this stage has a low age trend, before the bubble surface bar hope to go to this field, but this phase of pay more difficult, at present, we are still groping, Tuyere estimated to take two or three years to; second, the employment-oriented training stage, There are already the technologies in this field, but the is still under the main line, the current pure line to do this field has not a single big one; third, after the employment of the continuing learning stage, this stage of the program Ape is mainly hope to acquire more advanced technology, in order to seek a better position and so on, The area should be a more congested one, with the main players being the Geek college that got the SIG and the 22 million-dollar B-round financing in September of this year, and the start of the year in March to confirm the 20 million dollar a-round financing of the Revival brothers capital. So there may be opportunities to explore the first two areas, but the third area will be more difficult.

English Training class-foreign teacher one-on-one teaching

On-One one-on-one online English training, the low-end and high-end two of incisions have been occupied. The representative of the Low-cost market is today just announced to get the Sequoia capital of 55 million U.S. dollars in the 51talk,51talk of the main model is to recruit English teachers from countries such as the Philippines, so the course price can be reduced to 1/5 of other online training institutions, with a price advantage. And VIPABC, the higher end of the line, announced earlier this year that it had received a $100 million trillion round of funding from Alibaba Group, Temasek and Qiming Ventures, and launched an online education platform for young people's spoken foreign language learning VIPABCJR, which will also expand the online education market to learn Chinese.

Part Two: What can the market/Internet that may have new opportunities in the future do? ：

1, technology-driven data analysis company

Believe that becoming China's Knewton should be the vision of many domestic entrepreneurs. At present, although many companies say they want to do personalized teaching (or re-use-style), but due to the technical strength and insufficient number of users of the problem is blocked. Knewton's great point is that it is a re-use teaching system, can be based on large data to analyze the knowledge of students, so as to determine what knowledge to learn, how long for him to learn the most efficient.

For a chestnut, if a student's attention begins to drop and drain after 20 minutes of a class, the next Knewton will arrange the course content that will help the student concentrate in 20 minutes to improve efficiency. Once this can be interpreted into a student's technical model framework, Knewton can be used in various fields of teaching, from the United States to the university to primary and secondary schools, has been a lot of school has become Knewton users.

I think at home, whether it is from the point of view of the test paper to get students practice data, or from the school, help the teacher to do the examination data collection analysis angle to understand the students, or with the offline organization, etc., should be someone to try, because through these data to help teachers make personalized teaching decision-making, In order to achieve their aptitude, is a very valuable thing.

2, for the offline agencies do a good service to help them online under the combination of the company (O2O)

When pure online teaching becomes difficult, the traditional institutions that have been educated by the Internet may also be a good choice--after all, traditional institutions are the resource owners of the industry, and it's easier for them to do online business if they have the faculty.

The quick-Customer ERM I covered the other day was a good example of this venture. In the number of children's education institutions blowout, began to appear recruit students, there are institutions closed down, they feel for the agency to help them carry out the line of online under the model of the exploration-fast customer ERM mainly from the Crm+erp tool to start, The organization keeps track of a student's status from the time the salesperson comes in contact with the trainee. Including the number of classes, fees payable and classroom performance, so that the organization can better financial control of their own detailed access to funds, and online to do a good job of student management, so as to serve the parents side.

So that the traditional offline agencies in this is to explore the transformation, explore more online business, to give institutional online technical capacity, financial capacity of the Internet companies should also have a good opportunity.

3, the hardware field of education company/robot/early teaching market

The low age of education and training is a very obvious trend, whether it is the SSAT examination, or the establishment of all kinds of robot education and training institutions in support of this situation. And the reason that hardware is a chance for children's education, because the use of hardware (especially robots) to teach can be fun, not boring, children like, and it can let children from a very atomic point of view to understand the process of a world and even operational logic, such as assembly robot can learn mechanical principles, programming can understand 0, 1 of the logic of the operation, even through the robot programming to understand the biological world and so on, which is much better than cramming teaching a way, and can cultivate Chinese children with more creativity, with foreign more detailed.

4. Education Navigation

It would be a pity that the online education sector lacks a quality flow portal, and it is equally regrettable that students cannot find a service provider or content provider in a directory. This is also why the founder of the Li Haoyu this year chose to do a vertical "live course field to where" mode of the selection of the course network, because a lot of long tail of the live course providers lack a good mechanism to be found (for example, some teachers only on their own micro-blog propaganda about what they want to do in yy, But in fact the teacher is a very good teacher. With the growing number of startups in online education, there may be a good prospect of becoming such an entrance.

5. Explore the education company which can scale the tour mode

People who know the travel industry will know that many of the recent travel companies have chosen to do a parent-child tour/study tour, such as the COO Shei Shen and the original Thousand Night Travel Network co-founder Feng Yu. One of the inherent logic of this change is the education industry's profit margin > Tour industry > Tourism Industry, so people in the tourism industry will be more willing to generate additional value through education.

But today, many of the study tour program or high-end tourism, education is very small or low gold content, in addition, most of the study tour agencies are still small workshop status, has not been found can make this mode really migrated to the online, through the Internet to scale the way. This area is therefore still worth exploring.

6. The opportunity brought by the mobile end

While mobile internet is a commonplace proposition, and many people are pessimistic about the fact that the air of the mobile internet will end in a year or two, the reality is that there are still a handful of companies in the education sector that are based entirely on mobile and product excellence. The wonderful combination of the features of the mobile end and education is still to be tapped.

Part III: What kind of education team I am more optimistic about

The proposition is simple, if I can answer, I would like to have these three kinds of characteristics of the company: the first is the interactive approach to education, rather than one-way, cramming transmission (as a "total can not stand the idea of people have been reading, and inattention is simply the bane of the video course site =), Well done, like codecademy, onion mathematics, Duolingo, Youdao oral English master are counted as one of them; the second is a team of teaching and research staff, Yu Zhenpo and I said that he would like to find a focus on teaching research team, in the field of education to do research, like in the Internet to do the same products, Only concerned about teaching and research can find the best way to accept students, so that students really learn; the third is the Cross-border team. The internet has become more and more accessible, more and more people will study on the Internet, then the scope of education will be more than the original line under the traditional period of more expansion, then need professionals in this field to teach, such as our current Krypton Space professional Dream Team, is the financial field and the Internet field of people together, In order to do online education in the financial field, I believe there will be more examples in the future.

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