What is the future of online education?

A recent news report that Google has invested 40 million of dollars in online education (rumored to have visited 500 education companies for investment in online education) appears to be the peak of online education investment.

Many people have been discussing online education recently, many of them business people. Everyone seems to think that this is a big market and quite promising.

But I think they are still too optimistic.

Foreign situation because do not understand for a while, only analysis of domestic situation. Most of the online education companies are optimistic that their basics are based on two points: one is that education revolutionized with the help of technology; the first two was due to the success of the Internet business model, especially the success of E-commerce.

The 1th may be very easy to question, as long as you look at the history of educational technology, or simply looking back over the past more than 10 years of educational information, we can find that the revolutionary role of technology in education has not been supported by practice. In our "Flip Class" Project last year, a teacher who realized the normal teaching of "flip class", her experimental class and parallel classes did not show any differences in learning tests, and supported the argument that "media is irrelevant" from one side. But this is not the topic to be discussed today, the impact of online education development is more than the teaching itself.

06, I wrote a paper, "The education software is plagued with illness", mainly analyzes the survival predicament of educational software enterprises and the root cause of the predicament. Today, it seems, the situation has not changed much. Online education Enterprises, if they can not see these problems and find out the business model for these problems, I am afraid that the past the mistakes of education software companies.

In the application of information in many industries, such as finance, finance, retailing, and so on, a decade of development, there will be some national, well-known and even monopolistic enterprises, such as Ufida, Kingdee, Taobao, Beijing-east, etc., this is the law of the Internet industry. But the more than 10 years of the development of education informatization are almost the history of the decline of national enterprises. Clever, K12, the education star and so on a number of once swept the country's education software company, either closed down, or transformation, can survive is very good. Others have developed after the enterprise, also failed to become the industry's leading boss. The market of education informationization originates far earlier than the electronic commerce, why does not appear the strength outstanding enterprise?

In my 06 paper (Education Informatization, 2006 (10)), I analyzed the supply and demand of the educational software market, and later I developed it into a "reservoir" theory. If the education information market, for the purchase of educational information products of the funds as a reservoir of water, then each enterprise is a bucket, enterprises need to do is to find a way to bring the water in the reservoir into their own barrels. But there is also a connection between the cistern and the bucket, and who is responsible for the valve that controls the opening and closing of the pipe?

In general, the control of the valve should be the user, the user decided to which "bucket" "water", that is, buy which enterprise products, online buyers are decided to "water" valve. However, unlike in the field of electronic commerce, where the end-user is a student, teacher or school, the decision to purchase is in the regional education authorities, where students, teachers and even schools have little influence over the selection and procurement of products. In other words, a valid customer (with a purchase decision) is separated from the end customer (the actual user), and the latter has a very low constraint on the former. For enterprises, who pay for who services, to meet his needs, so this fragmentation will inevitably lead to increased business promotion costs and reduce product development and service inputs, it is difficult to produce excellent products. Coupled with the various interests involved in the real world, each region forms its own interest system, causes the market to be badly divided, the foreign enterprise is difficult to enter, the relative marginal benefit also is not good to realize, the enterprise cannot obtain enough benign development funds from the product quality itself, therefore also cannot develop the good enough product. This is the important reason that the national famous enterprise is difficult to appear in the Education informatization field.

Some people may say that the money in the field of education information is in addition to government agencies, there are a large number of students and parents ah. Theoretically, it is not ruled out that the future individual purchase amount exceeds the government procurement, but from the historical and current situation, the volume of individual purchase in the field of education information is only a small part, not enough to support the development and promotion of excellent products.

So why aren't students and parents willing to pay to buy online educational products?

The first thing to emphasize is that students are not effective customers, even though they are end customers. The real effective client is the parents, in other words, parents, not students, who decide whether to buy online educational products. Although the interests of students and parents are more consistent, the cognitive, mutual trust and dominant relationships between the two are not exactly the same. As the parents of effective customers, the acceptance and understanding of web-based learning is far from the maturity required for market development, the quality of online courses has not enough confidence, the self-discipline of their children is also not much emboldened. As for parents ' awareness and acceptance of online education, they have not seen much in-depth research, but from the attitude and choice of friends around us, we can see that not many parents have the courage to let their children take part in online learning, although these parents may fully accept the internet shopping. Even in the group of teachers, even in the education of information, how many people are willing to choose their children to receive online education instead of taking part in the actual extracurricular classes?

Most of the current online education is based on the Internet's mode of operation to design online education. This is of course very important, but if the concept of effective customers can not be changed, doubts can not be dispelled, worries can not be eliminated, confidence can not be established, then the market is not the basis of the business model is the most important part of the missing.

If the individual user's road cannot go out, can only go back to go to the government user, at this time, the decision product survival and the development important factor is not only the product quality. The separation and even antagonism of end customers and effective customers in the field of online education is an unavoidable obstacle to the development of this profession.

Another factor constraining the development of online education is the content and service of online education, which is much more complicated than we think. However, this topic needs to be discussed in another article.

Online education is a direction of educational development and a necessity of future life. However, both the should and the reality are often not uniform. How to seek a development strategy and business model that can guarantee the present survival need and meet the future development demand in the contradiction of the existing market, I am afraid it is the first question that the enterprise that wants to develop the online education market needs to think.