Reporter: Ma Haiyan
"Did you teach your children online?" became the greeting of parents this Spring Festival.
If you don’t go back to your hometown, travel, leave early, and offline training classes are stopped again, so much time is spent on the "God Beast Returning", and it is too wasteful not to study.
At the Spring Festival gala, the advertisements of education and training companies from small products to hard advertisements are telling you that this is a hot market.
Data map: Children attend class at home.
(Image and text irrelevant) Photo by China News Agency reporter Liu Zhongjun
Did you teach your children online?
"Student XX, the 5th grade comprehensive activity New Year charity live broadcast class will start at 9:30." Since February 6, Ms. Zhang can receive similar text messages every day.
The course she got occasionally from a group of parents, 43 lectures, ranging from two to five lectures a day, one lecture for one and a half hours.
Every day someone supervises the child for three to six hours of study for free, so she can't help but download the relevant software, register, and fill in the child's name, age, school and other real information.
"21 days, 43 lectures, just connected to the beginning of school, eliminating the middle Spring Festival holiday. The first two lectures a day, and the latter can only be supplemented by more lessons." Ms. Zhang quickly understood the marketer’s "diligence", but only for these ten days. To cover the three subjects of language, mathematics, and foreigners, as well as fashionable programming, science and other quality courses, it is estimated that each course can only be "experienced."
Soon she felt too wasteful of time.
The teachers vomit lotus flowers, each with their own style, and the children watch with gusto, no different from watching cartoons.
More importantly, she takes her eyesight. She faces the computer screen for three to six hours a day. She is afraid that the child's eyes have become myopia.
Ms. Gao is used to giving online lessons to her children.
She is no longer like Ms. Zhang as a parent who was won by training institutions with "free" bait. Her child has been offline and working for several years. Last year, because of the epidemic, she moved offline. Although she was also worried about her child's eyesight, the teacher of the training institution said "If you don't switch online, you can't follow that class." If children want to learn again in the future, they can only start from the elementary class.
Ms. Gao's child also has a piano lesson, and the teacher is also instigating the transfer, but she decisively refuses.
That's not as "urgency" as the math class.
On the eve of the Spring Festival, the Beijing Municipal Education Commission issued a verification notice, requiring online education institutions to comprehensively verify the qualifications of teachers, publicize information as required, and the duration of each class of online training shall not exceed 40 minutes, and shall not be advanced or in progress. Subject grade examinations and competitions for primary school students.
However, it’s not difficult for the tutoring agencies. Teachers’ qualifications are naturally there; each lesson does not exceed 40 minutes, so take a 10-minute break in the middle; for super-level teaching, there’s definitely no, don’t believe it, you check, those Olympiads are all It doesn’t exist. It has been replaced by various class codes such as Chuangxin 1, 2, 3, and 4; the subject competition has long been renamed as summer camp, travel study, and Quest. You will not have a chance to register without going through the counseling agency, because individual registration is not accepted. .
Data map: Students attend classes at home.
(Image and text irrelevant) Photo by Lu Pin
Epidemic: the “outlet” of online education?
The sudden outbreak of the new crown pneumonia in 2020 has ushered in online education.
Parents used to worry about the poor effect of online classes, and offline education still accounted for the bulk of revenue among head training institutions.
Studying at home for nearly a semester not only allowed the official "air classroom" to have the largest number of students, but also allowed training institutions to harvest the flow of "extracurricular supplements".
"At first, I felt that the school's recorded lectures were too shallow, so I tried the online courses of a certain training institution. During the epidemic, those online courses were all free! I chose a few famous ones to try. The teacher has a live broadcast room, and Like Internet celebrities, they let children give gifts and interact with them." Ms. Zhang has become a sufficient number of "pull heads" for training institutions.
After a while, school teaching returned to normal, and Ms. Zhang asked the child to stop the online class.
This year, the epidemic situation has changed dramatically. Since January 23, offline training of all training institutions in Beijing has been suspended, and another wave of online classes has ushered in.
As long as there is a training class, parents of children who have a foreign language and a beautiful sound and body will basically receive a similar notice: "Online class, can't you go?"
The latest data from the "Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status" released by the China Internet Network Information Center shows that as of December 2020, the number of online education users in China has reached 342 million, a decrease of 81.25 million from March 2020, accounting for 34.6% of the total Internet users. ; The number of mobile online education users reached 341 million, a decrease of 79.5 million from March 2020, accounting for 34.6% of mobile Internet users.
Ms. Zhang is undoubtedly one of the more than 80 million users in this reduction.
Due to the epidemic, I had to choose the online course, and when it was not necessary, I chose to quit.
Although many parents still have various concerns, investors' favor for this piece is obvious to all, and institutions and capital are still pouring in continuously.
Data from the "Statistical Report on China's Internet Development Status" shows that from January to October 2020, China's online education companies will add 82,000 new ones, accounting for 17.3% of the entire education industry.
From January to the end of November 2020, the online education industry disclosed a total of 89 financing incidents, with a total financing amount of approximately 38.8 billion yuan (RMB, the same below), a year-on-year increase of 256.8%.
On one side is a "free lunch", on the other is a steady stream of capital injection.
Cultivating users' usage habits and starting to charge again is a universal model for online education to make money.
Hard advertisements are placed in mainstream media, soft advertisements are placed on self-media, plus various free benefits and activities, and ultimately the wool will be on the sheep.
It is reported that the cost of acquiring lessons for an online English training organization has reached 1,000 yuan, and the cost of class hours passed on to consumers is four to five yuan per minute.
One-to-one, one-to-many, small class, large class, the profit model is also copied from offline to online.
Do you think that online education will be much cheaper than offline classes if it eliminates rent and other costs?
Offline to online classes like Olympic Mathematics are basically "just needed", and there are few discounts or low prices.
Most of the lessons that are free to experience are "diversion", and there will be no very systematic and in-depth content for you.
Once you switch to long-term reporting, online fees are not much cheaper than offline.
Even standing on the “wind vent” of 2020, education and training companies also have a large number of bankruptcies.
Last year, a small influential training institution broke and went bankrupt, and many parents’ pre-stored tuition fees were lost.
When the government provides preferential policies to encourage enterprises to resume work and production, many small and medium-sized organizations call for their enterprises to be included in the local tax reduction and rent reduction list.
The situation is very good, capital is blessed, and the "Matthew Effect" is becoming more and more obvious.
In the end, online education will still be a battle among leading companies, which is why many training institutions now have to divert their money when they lose money.
However, once you fall into a few dominances, price increases are inevitable, and offline stores will also be affected.
Data map: Children attend class at home.
Photo by Zhai Yujia
Whether to go up or not is always a problem
At the National Education Work Conference at the beginning of 2021, China’s Minister of Education Chen Baosheng pointed out that it is an urgent problem that we are currently facing with vigorous efforts to rectify and reorganize out-of-school training institutions. This problem cannot be solved and a good education ecology is difficult to form.
The goal of rectifying and rectifying off-campus training institutions is to reduce the burden on students and families, liberate students from extracurricular tutoring, and liberate parents from sending to school.
This matter must be done, we must take the initiative.
The melee of online training institutions undoubtedly made it difficult to achieve this goal.
For the parents who have been entrapped in the training ship, it is really not so easy to disembark.
"I heard that the current English enlightenment classes and mathematics thinking classes have started at the age of 2." Ms. Gao is glad that her child was born a few years earlier, at least a few years late on the road of "chicken baby".
"Online quality education" for children aged 2 to 6 has become the next outlet for capital.
The main thinking class of a head education and training institution has spread throughout the circle of friends.
It costs 2,800 yuan a year and 15 minutes of online classes a day. It sounds not expensive, but it may be useful. It is the idea of many parents to play with their children.
As everyone knows, the children's long journey to online lessons has just begun.