For those industries that are eager for quick success, I have a simple judgment:
Those companies that give me harassing phone calls, spam text messages, and even push messages on the APP every three to five minutes belong to this category. Buying and selling a house, bank loans, and online education all fall into this category.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > [Crimes and Penalties in Online Educational Institutions].</h1>
Before the summer vacation, there were various educational institutions to promote text messages every day, and every week I could receive harassing calls asking about applying for classes and making up classes, at that time I often wondered how these educational institutions knew my phone number, and also knew that there was a child in my family who went to school, and some even knew that the child went to several grades. What is even more exaggerated is that the child's own mobile phone has even received such a call, you know, her mobile phone contact is only three people.
Since the promulgation of the double reduction policy in August, mobile phones have finally been quiet - both online and offline harassing calls and text messages have stopped, even if the summer vacation, the peak of previous years's make-up classes, has not been disturbed. Without the harassment of educational institutions, the world has become clean!
However, if online educational institutions are the main culprits in pushing up make-up fees and increasing the burden of education, I think they should be divided into two rational views.
Let's start with the negatives. In the specific operation, some unconventional play of many online institutions has indeed had a negative impact on the industry, such as the following points:
First, individual institutions are indeed too utilitarian.
Various educational institutions, large and small, harassing text messages, harassing phone calls, more or less have affected personal lives. And those who obtain the family's private information, some even know the child's age, grade, and even in the teaching and auxiliary institutions of which class, it can be said that the bottomless use of personal privacy to promote business is undoubtedly more excessive.
Second, the prices of individual educational institutions push up the overall training price.
The unit price of the overall online education in China is about 100 yuan / section, about 50 yuan / hour, which has a certain price advantage over offline make-up course fees, you know, the offline make-up fees in third-tier cities, the minimum is more than 100 yuan. But some offline training, such as New Oriental summer camp, study tour camp, seven days of cost up to tens of thousands, where is education, live and get rid of is the clothing of education tourism. By the way, that's not even the rumored maritime tuition class.
Finally, there is the crazy burning of money to advertise
In 2020, online education has gone into a state of madness. I remember a company that went crazy about financing and an advertising war, and the entire education and training industry was involved. In 2020, the online education industry, only ape tutoring, good future, homework help, Gaotu four head online education enterprises to absorb more than 10 billion US dollars in financing, the average daily advertising quota during the summer period of millions of yuan.
Gaotu also turned from profit to loss in the burning war of online education. The net profit in fiscal 2019 was 226 million yuan, which was quite a beautiful year, while the full year of fiscal 2020 lost 1.393 billion yuan, of which 933 million yuan was lost in the Q3 quarter of fiscal 2020. I still remember that during last year's Spring Festival Gala, CCTV almost became a stage for various online institutions to compete and burn money, ape tutoring, homework gangs, all playing wild advertising.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="31" > [Can Educational Technology Solve Educational Problems].</h1>
In the last article, "The Status Quo of Make-up Classes in Third-Tier Cities", I summarized the logic of the existence of high make-up lesson fees:
From the institutional point of view, compulsory education can not meet the needs of all students to enter the high school, into the high school bidding model, so that the ticket to high school education, by the make-up fee speculated out of the sky-high price; from the school point of view, the make-up class to share part of the pressure of school education, teachers can focus on improving the rate of further education; and the intensive needs of one-child families, as well as the consumption capacity of the wealthy class, have boosted the make-up school fee.
On the surface, the utilitarian nature of test-taking education breaks the balance between supply and demand of educational resources; the bidding model breaks the fair distribution of educational resources. From a deep level, behind the problem of make-up tuition fees is the uneven distribution of Educational Resources in China, as well as the problems of educational efficiency and educational innovation.
So, what are the tricks of online educational institutions?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >1 Huge classroom for live lessons</h1>
Science and technology are promoting the progress of education, especially in terms of improving the reuse rate of educational resources, and the Internet online model has inherent advantages.
The size of small classes of offline make-up classes is generally about ten people; and the capacity of primary and secondary school classrooms is 40-50 people; 30 years ago, because of insufficient teacher resources, a class of 60 students; in universities, ladder classrooms, or large conference rooms, hundreds of people can be accommodated to listen to classes at the same time.
In a classroom such as Xueersi live online class, it can accommodate 2,000 or even tens of thousands of students to listen to the class at the same time. In order to ensure the effectiveness of thousands of students' lectures, Xueersi must ensure the stability of the live broadcast system on the one hand; at the same time, it is also necessary to recruit the best teachers as the main teachers.
Live online classes also strengthen the division of labor in teaching. The main teacher is only responsible for lecturing, preparing the curriculum, doing a good job of board books, so that the curriculum becomes relished, and the children absorb knowledge in the high-quality teaching process; while the class teacher is only responsible for keeping an eye on the completion of homework, accuracy, mastering the dynamics of student learning, often communicating with the parents of the child, and not participating in the teaching.
I do not deny that offline one-on-one tutoring, or one-to-many small classes, some can improve academic performance, but behind this kind of personalized tutoring, is to make the reuse rate of educational resources become extremely low; in learning and thinking, you can hear the courses of the country's top teachers, but the cost is only one-third or even one-fifth of offline tutoring, which is the improvement of educational efficiency brought about by technology.
Nor do I deny that online classes can lead to transitions with mobile phones and computers, and students can sometimes be distracted. However, for those children who love to learn, the quality of online online courses can be one step higher than that of offline teachers, and at the same time, they can maintain a high cost performance, so that most families can accept it.
This may be the educational progress brought about by digitalization and networking.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="36" >2 big data question bank</h1>
No educational institution can collect such a huge pool of question bank resources like the little ape search questions; and the search function provided by the homework help is also supported by a huge database. To tell the truth, these two institutions are no longer simple education APP, backed by a huge big data question bank resource, small ape search questions and homework help these two tool APP, with the attributes of education technology enterprises.
Search questions and question banks are the application of the Internet big data model in the field. The search function of the little ape search question and the homework help is playing the role of "Baidu" and "Google" in the field of education, compared to the traditional method, searching and shooting questions, so that the speed of finding an answer to a question and solving ideas is multiplied. Countless parents also have the help of these tools and software to help their children find answers to many difficult problems and solve problems.
The essence of education is sharing and dissemination, efficient sharing and rapid dissemination, storage, is the strength of the digital economy and the Internet. I have to admit that the combination of digital and network technology and education, and the application of big data, allow online education companies to explore new education methods, while also upgrading traditional education methods.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="37" >3 Artificial intelligence</h1>
The core of the technical search and shooting of questions is the ability of graphic recognition, which is a very mature field in the current artificial intelligence technology. It is also this intelligent entrance that allows the little ape to search for questions and help with homework on the smart phone platform, which greatly saves the time of entering questions and improves the learning efficiency.
The application of artificial intelligence is far more than just searching for questions.
Speech recognition technology is also widely used in the field of education. In the field of hardware, Xiaomi's little love teacher (a 500 yuan learning phone) can search for words through voice, can use speech recognition technology to check the ancient text recitation on the mobile phone, and when learning words, it can also score whether the pronunciation is standard.
In the future, there are many application scenarios of artificial intelligence technology in the field of education. For example, with the help of image recognition technology and the ability to search for questions in batches, automatic judgment of pictures, judgment of papers, machine analysis of composition quality; with the help of speech recognition, use artificial intelligence to correct pronunciation, learn spoken English, and so on.
USkid (USkid) is an English learning institution that takes care of both online and offline. Whether it is the tracking and actual results of learning from knowledge, they use the recognition technology done by convolutional neural networks and machine inspection and scoring based on natural language processing, and the speech recognition scoring technology based on the Chinese features to evaluate the child's learning effect.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="24" > [Conclusion].</h1>
Under the double-reduction policy, the news that educational institutions are having a bad time is not uncommon in recent months.
In early August, media reported that Wall Street English would declare bankruptcy, with a 27-year history, and Giant Education, which "teaches and trains the Whampoa Military Academy", has recently closed down. GaoTu, who became famous by K12 education, has become the third largest education giant in the US stock market after New Oriental and Good Future. But after entering the summer vacation, the stock prices of these three education giants have plummeted, staging a cliff-like decline.
Education is not guilty, all online education and APP, from the founder to every employee, have a kind heart. Ten thousand steps back, no matter how bad the educational products are, they have a conscience than the best game products. Game companies are still alive, how can educational software give up?
Compared with the offline one-on-one and small class training, I am more optimistic about the professional teachers of online courses and the large classrooms empowered by artificial intelligence. The former is personalized education, but it is eating away at the already stretched educational resources; while the latter, the excellent educational resources will be widely and efficiently and cost-effectively transmitted.
Among the double reduction policies implemented in various places, some of them are puzzling to suppress the voices of online institutions, such as the stop-and-shoot function and the search application. To tell the truth, a child who relies on the search software to do the problem, even if he or she does not shoot the question and does not search the question, he (she) will definitely copy the homework; moreover, the search for the question is not only the answer, but also the problem solving process and skills. This kind of blunt implementation of the double reduction policy due to choking on food may not work, but it will make those parents who often search for questions confused.
Today's online education companies can at least refer to the practice of Internet finance; and the top management can also learn from the policies. P2P online lending is a mess, but artificial intelligence-enabled Internet finance is an irreversible trend in the future, the same reason, compared with the subtraction of offline high-fee one-to-one education, online education institutions are adding to the education industry.