Recently, TAL has successively established a number of subsidiaries, whose business scope includes software development, technical services, intelligent hardware and other fields.
This information verifies the information revealed at TAL's 2022 opening conference not long ago - TAL has entered the second stage of entrepreneurship and has begun a comprehensive transformation.
Non-educational training business such as technology services will be its key business in the future.
According to sources close to TAL, TAL is adjusting its business and organization in a timely manner according to the dynamics of education policies, looking for new business pivots, breakthroughs and growth paths, and turning to non-educational categories such as technology services, smart hardware, and life sciences.
This means that TAL is no longer just an education company, but a technology company.
Turn to TO B to promote education informatization
In the past 8 months of exploration, TAL has completely drawn a line from subject training and found a new direction for transformation.
In addition to turning to quality education with the help of past educational resources, it is turning to the B-end market, giving full play to its past educational technology advantages, providing technological services for the government and schools, and helping the construction of educational informatization and educational resources digitization.
In this context, on December 21, 2021, TAL Group announced a comprehensive upgrade of its To B business, launched a new brand of American School, and provided the education industry with complete live broadcast, teaching and research, and AI system solutions, and improved industry technology services and digitalization. level.
The organizational structure of TAL has also been adjusted accordingly. The original technology center, data center, and content center have all been merged into the American school, and Tian Mi, the CTO of TAL, is in charge.
It is reported that the core business of the American school can be divided into three parts: live broadcast cloud, teaching and research cloud and Zhixue cloud.
Teaching and Research Cloud is to provide a complete online and offline integration (OMO) solution for educational organizations, including cloud disk management, teacher teaching and research, question bank construction, online and offline teaching, after-class evaluation, teaching data visualization and other system support; The live broadcast cloud mainly provides a live broadcast service platform suitable for various scenarios and various types of classes, helping educational organizations to quickly build online education business.
What are the advantages of TAL?
Education informatization has always been a development direction encouraged by the government.
As early as 2018, the Ministry of Education issued the "Education Informatization 2.0 Action Plan", saying that a large platform of "Internet + Education" would be established; at the end of 2021, the "14th Five-Year Plan" National Informatization Plan of the Central Network Security and Informatization Commission. It is clearly stated that it is necessary to "improve the level of education informatization infrastructure construction and build a high-quality education support system".
The relevant R&D personnel of TAL's teaching and research cloud said that in the process of training and using the teaching and research cloud for teachers of public schools in Pingtang County, Guizhou Province, he could clearly feel the desire of local teachers and schools for information services.
"Teachers usually have heavy teaching tasks, and there are still a lot of administrative tasks to deal with. There is a great need for a platform like the Teaching and Research Cloud, which not only allows them to prepare lessons according to their needs, but also choose teaching and research tools that can better represent the content of the course."
The difficulty is that China is a vast territory, and the teaching content varies from place to place, and even each school has its own unique needs.
How to meet the personalized and localized needs of these public schools in an all-round way is a difficult problem for education companies that want to specialize in public service.
In order to solve such a problem, firstly, we need to have a large number of content resources and teaching and research tools, which can meet the needs of teachers in teaching and researching as much as possible; secondly, we need to have excellent technical strength, not only to meet the needs of teachers in various types of teaching and research teaching. Functional requirements can be guaranteed, and adjustments can be made according to the actual situation of the school.
In response to the first problem, TAL has accumulated high-quality teaching and research resources accumulated over the years in the teaching and research cloud, covering nearly 100 versions nationwide, tens of millions of high-quality knowledge points, learning videos, experimental materials, interactive materials, etc.
At the same time, it also provides a variety of courseware production tools, including graphic courseware, 2D and 3D interactive courseware production, and a one-stop paper group system, which can quickly select topics and automatically typesetting according to chapters and knowledge points, fully empowering teachers in teaching and research. Prepare for lessons.
In terms of technical capabilities, TAL's American School Zhixue Cloud has concentrated the achievements and resources of TAL's technology research and development in the past. The live broadcast cloud has undergone various sudden tests in the past two years. In addition to the peak traffic, it has also successfully supported remote teaching of quality courses such as piano, art, and sports through multi-scenario services.
Explore life science, "Love and technology create a better life"
In addition to American schools, TAL is also making efforts in overseas markets.
After the "double reduction", TAL issued an open letter internally.
The letter stated that "TAL Group will continue to establish overseas business models, brand recognition and operational capabilities in the next five to ten years or even longer," and "will include new business models centered on technology and content. model."
In fact, TAL started the process of internationalization a few years ago, and successively set up overseas branch campuses in the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore.
In 2019, ThinkAcademy, TAL's branch in Silicon Valley, USA, launched courses featuring traditional Chinese culture, including traditional Chinese festivals, Chinese food culture, and Chinese mythology, which are deeply loved by many overseas families, including many non-Chinese families.
Relevant personnel said that in recent years, with the rapid development of China, Chinese traditional culture is very popular overseas. Not only Chinese families are eager to find suitable Chinese learning institutions for their children, but many non-Chinese families also hope to be able to contact more. Chinese culture.
TAL's goal is more long-term, not just "love and technology make education better".
At TAL's 2022 opening conference, TAL's founder and CEO Zhang Bangxin proposed that he is considering changing the mission to "Love and technology create a better life".
The relevant person in charge of TAL revealed that life science is also one of the directions of TAL’s transformation and exploration. TAL has always been concerned about this field. As early as 2018, it has established a brain science laboratory and reached relevant agreements with many universities. Collaborate to explore research in the field of brain science.