After a year, let's look at the education OMO

In 2020, the epidemic suddenly struck, offline education and training once fell into a state of suspension, OMO has become the hottest word in the education industry.

Many educational institutions have proposed to invest one billion or two billion yuan in OMO construction.

After 2021, has the company that released its bold words practiced? How is the OMO model developing in the education industry?

1. Sorry, your OMO is offline

At that time, OMO had a great momentum of subverting the education and training industry.

When many brokers write monthly and weekly reports in the education industry, they recommend paying attention to OMO:

Announcements from well-known public companies indicate that OMO is the main strategy, but also add related marketers:

In the primary market, the founder of some educational institutions said, "Do not talk about OMO, basically can not get financing"; investors in the secondary market are also very recognized by the landing of OMO, for example, Ruisi Education announced product upgrades in the 2020 Q2 financial report, officially entered the OMO model, in the three days after the release of the financial report, the stock price rose by nearly 150%.

However, as the outbreak subsides, the voice of OMO is also gradually weakening. Last July, the progress of the OMO model suddenly came to a standstill, and even OMO press releases stopped appearing.

The Blue Whale Education Inventory found that after july last year, only China Public Education said it would still implement OMO. Other listed companies are rarely mentioned in their earnings reports.

In fact, when the OMO model was hot, many investors said, "The opportunities for OMO will be in large institutions, not entrepreneurs."

Because of the three models of OMO, whether it is a dual teacher, an experience center, or a learning center, its construction requires a lot of investment.

Lin Hao (pseudonym), the former technical leader of the IOS team of a proposed listed education company, told Blue Whale Education that the development of a mature online teaching tool is not easy, and the technical team invested in his company before and after has 30-40 people, and the development time is as long as 2 years, this investment is at least tens of millions, and the cash flow of many entrepreneurial companies may not be supported for several months, and the development will be interrupted.

Lin Hao said that even some suppliers heard that educational institutions came to purchase the relevant capabilities of online broadcasting, and SaaS companies did not accept it, because they were afraid that they would not be able to pay the balance.

Nascent startups can't compete with traditional training giants to provide a full range of complete teaching service products, so once the industry leaders can't be sure if they have the ability to continue OMO exploration, OMO naturally loses its heat.

2. OMO "dud", do not excuse the cold winter

Of course, the "dud" of OMO is not all about this.

The growth roots of OMO are basically unstable, and Blue Whale Education found that there are three main reasons for OMO to "dud":

First, the transformation OMO proposed by many institutions at that time was "pretend transformation".

At that time, Pan Xin, the former COO of New Oriental Online, mentioned when talking about OMO: "The concept of OMO, the vast majority of institutions are used for emergency response. When many institutions lay out online, they simply copy the offline teaching model, only Online does not have Anoffline, which is not the correct path for online and offline integration.

It is reported that the institutions that really do OMO will first develop or outsource the development of a course learning platform, and most of the courses will adopt a dual-teacher teaching model, and the qualified institutions will integrate AI technology to enhance teaching feedback. This process is the process of building online capabilities, but many companies are "take-ism", buy a platform or use low-code development in the short term, "drag" out of a platform, and abandon it after the epidemic subsides, and the OMO model only exists for a short time.

As Pan Xin once mentioned, the company should take this opportunity to build the ability to go online, even if it is not so strong, it is good to have it, and it can cope with unforeseen needs in the future. So the tide receded, and everyone found that there were really few companies that really built online capabilities.

Second, the tracks that are less affected by the policy do not have a clear idea of how to land OMO.

Taking quality education as an example, before a famous educational institution announced that it would do street dance training and use the OMO model to teach, this OMO refers to "offline teaching + online recording and broadcast consolidation".

Some people question, isn't this just using WeChat to record an assignment for the teacher to check, how can it still rise to OMO? Therefore, how to combine offline guidance and online feedback is a problem in front of the incoming OMO.

Da Xiong (pseudonym), a teacher (pseudonym) who has been engaged in sports training in the middle and college entrance examinations for many years in a certain area of Zhejiang, told Blue Whale Education that it was really convenient to move the K12 subject tutoring offline classes to online, and teachers only need a handwriting board to achieve it.

However, the action class in sports requires a large area of venue and large action guidance, which is not suitable for online, and the big bear teacher believes that the sports line class emphasizes the interactive atmosphere, the teacher needs to observe the student's expression and state, and it is foreseeable that the OMO model parents do not buy it.

Most importantly, education is a non-standardized product after all, and the integration of online education and offline education always needs to be honed.

Xiao Wolf, the person in charge of Oriental Youbo, once proposed that online and offline mixed learning is normalized, but it is impossible to subvert offline online. Little Wolf observed that for the online model, children under the age of 8 had the highest proportion of online classes. The higher the age, the lower the proportion, because the more up you go, the more you pursue results and the pursuit of achievement improvement, in this case, parents' attitude towards online institutions is becoming more and more indifferent.

Perhaps, under the current technical conditions, OMO is only a complement effect for the time being, which can only help the overall education process to improve the teaching effect with intelligent means, and the real improvement of some grades may require deeper interaction. But before the overwhelming OMO model struck, the agency could not really calm down.

3. Is adult education the last way out for OMO?

At this stage, in the practice of the OMO model, adult education that is less affected by the policy may be the last to adhere to the OMO model.

A Xing, the former senior product manager of an online education company, told Blue Whale Finance that he was once responsible for building user interaction on the AI dual-teacher platform, and his team found that the most popular CPA tutoring in adult education was already testing the "first generation OMO" model when doing market analysis.

The demand for these financial training institutions is relatively stable, the unit price is high, the cash flow is not tight, and there is no need to tell stories to push up the valuation.

Some people in the industry believe that OMO may have "great achievements" in the university for the elderly. Because the elderly do not "demand" the learning effect, focusing on the sense of experience participation and the sense of achievement, some of the teaching and research services brought by OMO are incomparable, which can increase the sense of experience for middle-aged and elderly people.

The person said that with the aging of the population in the future, whether from the market size or demand characteristics, the elderly universities and preschool, lower grade tracks are the most similar, such as focusing on the sense of experience, not pursuing achievements, campuses can be scaled, high demand, relatively easy to join, very worthy of large-scale transformation attempts.

From the full advancement of enterprises to OMO, to the OMO dud, it is only a year and a half. Looking back at that time, the popularity of OMO in the education circle was no less than the current heat of the meta-universe in the capital market.

A marketing master once said that chasing hot spots is a manifestation of incompetence, in fact, this sentence is also suitable for the education track, after all, education is the foundation of a century-old evergreen, hot spots are only a temporary popularity, OMO model, naturally not a universal "good medicine".

This article originated from Blue Whale Finance