Content payment can not buy real knowledge, online education can solve?

Content payment can not buy real knowledge, online education can solve?

What form will the windfall of content payment and knowledge economy take to affect online education?

Mobile Internet technology has once again revolutionized the efficiency of communication. Whether it's "Get", Zhihu or today's headlines, content dissemination is carried out in an increasingly fragmented way, and the cost of channels has been drastically reduced.

Deducing along this trend, after the great enrichment and fragmentation of content, users' demand for efficiency of content will gradually increase. In other words, under the state of knowledge anxiety, users will tend to use the most efficient method to obtain information. Accordingly, the content that remains will be of relatively high quality.

Next, the knowledge absorption scene may still remain fragmented, but users are no longer satisfied with fragmented knowledge, but rather the pursuit of more systematic, structured content. This process is like going from a fragmented article, to a collection of magazines and books, to an educational course that matches the explanation. Now that we are at the stage of 'magazines' everywhere, we can look forward to the 'books' and 'education' that follow.

This means that there will be a big branch of the paid content and knowledge economy that will fall on 'scaling online education'.

People are getting used to paying for content.

What areas could create demand for online education at scale?

Considering that the two currently listed educational institutions, New Oriental and Xueshis, are specialized in English and science education for primary and secondary students respectively, we tend to believe that the market space in these two areas is large enough for demand to be scaled up, and from which we can come up with good online education institutions, and have invested in Onion Mathematics and Fanbei.

These two companies rely on word-of-mouth to build up their user base, and their customer acquisition costs are much lower than the industry's. Onion Math has grown from 0 to 10 million users, and Fanbei has grown from 0 to 50 million users. On this basis, in the second quarter of last year, they started to try to charge users one after another, and initially verified the feasibility of paying for online education. Fanbei has begun to profit, and onion math revenue is growing rapidly.

Reviewing the founding process of these two companies, we can see some *** same qualities from the founders to balance the educational ideals and the pace of commercialization.

Onion Math's three co-founders, Yang Linfeng and Zhu Ruochen, who graduated from Harvard and Duke universities, respectively, ****together created Sunshine Bookstore, a public service organization dedicated to promoting the development of information technology in rural education, in 2011.

They observed that the gap between urban and rural education lies not in facilities such as teaching hardware, but in the learning experience, and found that there are two key factors contributing to the difference in learning experience: teaching methods and teacher quality. In the short term, neither of these two problems can be solved by traditional means, and the only way out is to use the digital means of online education.

In fact, urban education also has the same problem of poor learning experience. But creating a standardized online education product requires a huge investment in people and resources, which is difficult for NGOs to accomplish alone, so they decided to go commercial at the end of 2013. They piloted the product in several key middle schools in Beijing and a few rural schools to verify the applicability of the standardized learning product from one end of the spectrum to the other.

There were many difficult moments in the process, such as the fact that the online standardized curriculum was more difficult to create than they had imagined and had a long lead time. In the first year or so of commercial development, they were plagued by a supply of courses that couldn't keep up with demand, a production process that was difficult to standardize, and a pace of commercialization that was too slow.

When Wang Jie, the founder of Fanbei, closed an angel round of funding in 2011 and wanted to go further, he realized that the market didn't have enough confidence in online English learning. He decided to pause his next round of funding and instead became self-sufficient by charging community users, gradually building his monthly revenue from 2,000 yuan to more than 100,000 yuan. This was almost impossible to achieve in the PC era, but he did it with a lot of backbone, and built a great relationship with his users, much of which continues today.

We invited Zhang Lufang, a researcher in the education industry at Tianfeng Securities, along with Yang Linfeng and Wang Jie, to talk about how they see the relationship between online and traditional education, the possibilities for profitability, and the opportunities presented by the wave of paid content.

The best way to educate is for you to sit at this end and Socrates at that end

Lufang: At the beginning of the development of online education, people were concerned about the battle between online and offline, to see if online education could use the merging of like with like to bring the offline part of it into its own Internet design. If offline traditional education is more of a service, is online education essentially a service or an Internet product?

Lin Feng: The cutoff between the two is not that clear. Online education follows the logic of neither product nor service, but the logic of course. Online or offline, there are differences in the user's consumption habits, but the process of consumption contains these elements: where, what to buy, how long it took, how much to gain, how much money to pay for it.

Following the logic of the course's greatest value is to make learning this thing to produce results, and realize the value of the closed loop requires several steps:

Attract students. Getting students to want to invest the time to pay attention translates into learning results through sustained attention.

Build a superior product. A product that centers around the learning itself, from the content to the interaction, and is worthy of the time invested by the student.

Perceptual level. Students have a good learning experience and see results through improved test scores; parents find that their children are willing to take the initiative to continue to learn and improve their grades, so they are willing to pay for it.

The standardized online learning experience created by Onion Math is not based entirely on user consumption habits, but rather on the logic of the curriculum. For example, although we are located in a purely online learning experience, considering that some parents are not yet fully accustomed to the purely online format, we will also make books to assist in enhancing the online learning experience.

We are trying to superimpose service features on top of standardized products, but instead of human-based services, we're using human-computer interaction and using machines to provide services. The online education that Onion Math is exploring will not be a 'human' heavy model.

Online education is not an online replica of the traditional classroom.

Lu Fang: I came into contact with an online education company in Taiwan, whose core business is selling hard disks and also providing accounts on online learning platforms. According to research, only 36% of the students who use their products will continue to attend offline training organizations. What is the situation on our side? How do you understand the relationship between online education and offline classrooms?

Wang Jie: Online education must not be an online version of the offline classroom.

I think the most important mission of online education is to truly reach the goal of teaching thousands of people according to their abilities. I don't remember where I read a quote: the best way to educate is to put a table, you sit at this end, Socrates sits at that end. If you have a great teacher like Socrates who is willing to teach you one-on-one, then how can you teach something out of it.

But the question is, where in the world can you find so many good teachers?

The current model of the offline classroom is a continuation from the industrial age, and is in fact a compromise in the cost structure in order to achieve the goal of large-scale universal education, at the cost of which it is impossible for the teacher to take care of the progress and idiosyncrasies of each student.

Online education is expected to dramatically improve the efficiency of both teaching and learning through technological means. On the one hand, the content taught by the teacher can be replicated indefinitely at a very low cost; on the other hand, the path of student learning can be customized at a very low cost. In some standardized areas, AI is even expected to replace teachers to a considerable extent.

The combination of these factors will create a completely different form of online education than the offline classroom, and will operate at a cost structure that is unimaginable for traditional institutions.

Lincoln: We didn't specifically define whether online education is an alternative or a supplement to offline education. In fact, whether or not students enroll in offline tutoring classes has nothing to do with us. Enrollment in classes is sometimes an irrational choice, influenced by the psychological factor of "if others do it, I must do it too", and in the current examination environment, parents' anxiety and consumption habits cannot be washed away at once just by a few online education products from a few companies.

Online education relies on digital devices and focuses on human-computer interaction.

The essence of online education is that people learn through a digital interactive experience, not at a person. It is a way of learning based on digital native platforms and Internet communication channels, the carrier of content and interaction have changed, and accordingly, product design and learning scenarios are very different from offline education.

The reason why current online education products don't seem to be sufficiently differentiated from offline education is partly because people are more familiar with the offline education model, and it's the fastest and least costly way to move directly from offline experience. But over time, the differentiation between the two is bound to grow.