On the evening of May 6th, the 23rd Harvard China Forum was officially opened. Against the background of the huge impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in the global economy, this year's Harvard China Forum has the theme of "deepening consensus and working together", including four major theme forums: business, venture capital, internationalization and medical treatment. Affected by the epidemic situation, this forum is held online, and the global live broadcast of the entire process is synchronized on the network platform.
Although the new coronary pneumonia epidemic has caused significant losses to the global economy, new business revelations and opportunities have emerged from it. In the business forum held on the first day, Michael A. Szonyi, director of the Harvard University Fei Zhengqing China Research Center and Harvard University Chinese History Professor, served as the moderator. Group founder, chairman and CEO Chen Dongsheng, New Hope Liuhe Co., Ltd. chairman Liu Chang, Wumei Group founder and multi-point Dmall chairman Zhang Wenzhong, broadband capital chairman and AsiaInfo Group chairman Tian Shuning started a dialogue. He expressed his views on the current economic situation and the future development of various industries.
In Yu Minhong's view, the epidemic has brought tremendous challenges to the field of education, and it has also brought about a major revolution. He admitted that New Oriental faced three major challenges at the beginning of the outbreak. First, more than 1 million students had to switch to online classes, and their children and parents' knowledge and acceptance of online education were unknown. Most of them are offline teachers and have almost no online teaching experience. During the Spring Festival, many teachers do not have computers and live broadcast equipment. They need to receive teaching training and complete the equipment within a few days; third, New Oriental ’s own "cloud classroom" online teaching The platform and any third-party platform were unable to support New Oriental ’s huge student population and strong interactive small class courses. It was a huge problem to significantly expand and upgrade its own platform in less than a week.
"But in the end we still carried it, from the platform to the teachers have withstood the test, the vast majority of students and parents are very satisfied with the experience and effect of online teaching. Among all education and training institutions, New Oriental can be said to respond to the outbreak One of the most successful institutions. "Yu Minhong believes that the revolutionary change brought about by this epidemic is that China is from the city to the countryside, from teachers to parents and students, all have the fastest speed to contact and become familiar with online education, which will follow up The field of education has many profound effects:
The first impact is that the penetration and transformation of technology in education will become the norm. That is to say, technology has accelerated the application in the middle of education, and has been integrated with education. In the end, the two will be inseparable. This has a huge impact on the future. To a certain extent, it means that students will shift from taking classrooms as the core to the concept of dual core and dual platforms for classrooms and online.
The second impact that followed was the change in education models. In the past, people often talked about purely online or purely ground education. In fact, this change will bring an irreversible OMO model. Offline and online education will be organically integrated. This is in primary and secondary education. Will be particularly prominent. It will even spawn new business models. "After the epidemic, we will see that the area of greatest change may be the field of education, and the future is expected."
Another major impact is that within five years we should be able to see that a number of very powerful educational companies, including educational content companies, educational platform companies, and educational technology companies, will emerge in China and even the world. Educational companies with tens of billions of dollars or even tens of billions of dollars. Immediately afterwards, the capital field will further increase investment in the field of education, which will produce the effect of closer integration of education and technology in the future.
During the Q & A session, some audience members raised the question of whether educational informatization would increase educational inequality. Yu Minhong said that from the perspective of personal practical experience, it would not increase, but narrowed. He explained that New Oriental probably educates two to three hundred thousand rural and mountain children every year, many of them through the dual-teacher classroom model. One of his big feelings is that the children are teaching from excellent teachers from big cities through the other end of the screen , Can learn better, for example, foreign teachers in New Oriental can give them more standard English classes. In this sense, education informatization has greatly narrowed the gap between urban and rural education, and children in rural areas can get better through the Internet connection. Educational resources. I believe that with the development of technology, the gap between urban and rural children will become smaller and smaller in terms of access to learning resources. In fact, New Oriental is also selecting children from rural and mountainous areas who are better at learning, and pouring more excellent educational resources.
It is understood that the Harvard China Forum was established in 1997 and is the largest and oldest student-organized China Summit in North America. The forum aims to provide a platform for constructive dialogue, in-depth discussion of the challenges, problems and trends facing China, change the participants' traditional impression of China, and encourage them to make suggestions for building a better future for China. The forum invites business leaders, academics, and political leaders to express their opinions. Participants will have the opportunity to listen to world-renowned experts' opinions on various topics related to China.