Since 2018, K12 online education industry ushered in "eventful years": online training apps such as "little ape search questions" have been exposed one after another; "Xueba 1-to-1" and "Liyou 1-to-1" are in financial crisis; "Leader 1 to 1" is suspected of excessive marketing; EF Education foreign teachers involved in drugs
On July 15, the Ministry of Education, together with the Central Cyberspace Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the National "Anti pornography and Anti illegal" Office and other departments jointly issued the "Implementation Opinions on Regulating Off campus Online Training", which pointed out that the trainers should provide teacher qualification certificates, the employment of foreign personnel must comply with relevant national regulations, and relevant information should be publicized; The training content is healthy, the course duration is reasonable, and parents can supervise online; Implement the record review system; Standardize operation and maintain user information security; Rectification within a time limit before the end of June 2020; Establish a black-and-white list of enterprises and publicize it.
This is the first normative document issued by the state for off campus online training activities, K12 online education industry has entered a new stage of supervision.
"Go on duty when you come"
"There is no one who doesn't apply for training classes for children now, but parents are usually busy with their work and don't have time to pick up and send their children. If the elderly are responsible for taking care of the children at home, it is not convenient to travel back and forth, so they choose online remedial classes." Yang Qing applied for online training classes for children in third grade. In fact, online training is not cheaper than offline training, but electronic equipment has great attraction for children, and children will not have too much resistance.
According to iResearch, there are about 100 million primary school students, 43 million junior high school students and 23 million senior high school students in K12 public schools across the country. These 160 million students have become the main force to promote the development of K12 education market. In addition, nearly 16 million 6-year-old children enter primary schools every year, constantly injecting fresh blood into this market.
According to the venture capital channel of People's Daily Online, summer vacation is the peak period for online training, and the demand for teachers from major institutions is that more is better. Old education giants such as New Oriental and XRS have strict requirements for teachers to be recruited. Teachers to be recruited need to obtain teacher qualification certificates, pass the entrance examination, and have year-end assessment. The system of survival of the fittest is adopted. Due to the good treatment and rapid promotion of leading enterprises, job seekers will scramble to apply, so enterprises have the initiative to choose, which also makes small institutions only "pick up the leftovers". In the face of such a huge potential market, teachers have become the hot cakes in large and small training institutions.
Behind the fanatical consumption, teachers are good and bad.
Zhang Yixue has taught in two K12 online training institutions, She said: "Now the national policy for extracurricular online training is becoming more and more strict, but there is a shortage of teachers in large and small institutions, especially in the summer. Some training institutions with a large demand for teachers require on-the-job teachers to obtain teacher certificates as soon as possible, and recruitment does not necessarily require teachers to obtain teacher certificates or be full-time."
According to the venture capital channel of People's Daily Online, some online training institutions belong to the "on the job" system. As long as the basic English listening and speaking ability of teachers is good, as for whether they have obtained the teacher qualification certificate, everyone has the attitude of "turning a blind eye to a blind eye". The so-called teachers from famous universities publicized by some institutions are actually undergraduates or postgraduates, who only use their spare time to earn living expenses. Most of them have not received special teaching training and have no experience in teaching practice.
Li Li, a graduate student, once taught part-time junior high school English online in Haifeng Education. Haifeng's interview was conducted via video, and she was asked to try out a junior high school English cloze test. If she passed the test, she could teach directly. Before that, she had no teaching experience. She told the People's Daily Online venture capital channel: "Although I am an English major in this science, I don't think my English is very good. However, Haifeng has provided ready-made teaching PPT, so I just need to follow the instructions. It's not difficult."
Now, the Opinions require all teachers of online training institutions to obtain teacher qualification certificates before June next year, which is undoubtedly a huge challenge for online training institutions that are difficult to attract enough teachers.
In addition, users' information security is difficult to guarantee, the class hours are too long, the content is beyond the outline, and the emergence of pornographic and online game information is also an urgent problem for extracurricular online training institutions.
Savage growth and profit dilemma
By taking the Internet convenient car, a number of online training institutions have sprung up, and traditional offline training has also moved to online. More Internet giants are willing to spend huge sums of money to seize online training highlands. According to the 2018 Annual Investment and Financing Report of the Education Industry by Whale Media, there were 579 primary market financings in the education industry in 2018, an increase of 40.53% year on year, and the amount of financing reached 52.395 billion yuan, an increase of 87.79% year on year.
According to iResearch, The K12 online education industry CR4 (the top four share concentration index in the industry) is less than 5%, which is a diversified development market. The industry players compete in multiple tracks. New Oriental Online and Haifeng Education are modelled online live teaching platforms; Xuebajun, Small Box Technology (the original "homework box"), etc. are personalized brands with homework guidance as the main product; English fluency, 51Talk, etc. are fun learning APP; There are also Alibaba, Tencent and other Internet giants who are eyeing each other. According to statistics, Tencent has made 25 investments in education, including New Oriental Online VIPKID two leading enterprises; Ali started 9 times, including VIPKID and small box technology, which are now transforming into AI education ecology.
In 2014, online education investment and financing started the rush mode. Public data shows that from 2013 to 2015, online education investment and financing events rose from 42 to 470, reaching a historical peak. In 2018, there were eight K12 online education investment and financing events with more than $100 million. In 2019, the investment fever has not subsided: the leader got 350 million dollars in E-round financing one-on-one; Small Box Technology won Alibaba's round D financing of 150 million US dollars; Gaosi Education received a round D financing of 140 million dollars; Onion Math won round D financing of 300 million yuan.
While being sought after by capital, online education institutions are in a profit dilemma. At present, most of the companies that have been listed or intend to be listed face huge losses.
The net losses of 51Talk and English Speaking on NYSE last year were 417 million yuan and 488 million yuan respectively.
At the end of last year, after Hujiang passed the Hong Kong Stock Exchange hearing and updated its prospectus, its listing progress stalled. In 2019, it was suddenly exposed that large-scale layoffs had occurred. During the period from 2015 to 2017, the total loss of Hujiang has exceeded 1.2 billion yuan, and the loss has continued to expand, leading to the failure of its gambling listing agreement. According to the VAM, Hujiang must complete the listing before the end of 2018, otherwise it is required to buy back the shares held by investors.
According to the report released by Guangzhou Securities Hang Seng, the overall performance of the primary market in 2018 is that education investment tends to be rational, high investment flows to more mature targets, and the general trend of the industry is good. From the perspective of the number of investment and financing, the number of investment events declined after Q2 2018, and the market returned to rationality.
According to the analysis of Guangzhou Securities Hang Seng, the measurement indicators of online education enterprises include four aspects: customer acquisition ability, customer retention ability, user quality and liquidity ability. High customer acquisition costs and low payment conversion rate are the crux of the widespread losses in the online education industry.
An online education investor of Jiuding Investment said: "The most important thing of online education is the ability to obtain customers. The main reason for the loss is the high marketing expenses, followed by the high labor costs, because teachers are very mobile."
Zhang Yixue believes that traffic is the key way for online training institutions to expand their influence to obtain customers. Now the traffic is almost in the hands of search engine giants, and the amount of money enterprises spend on traffic accounts for a large proportion of their revenue.
Some media quoted industry insiders as saying that XRS, ape tutoring and Homework Group, the "Three King Kong" of online education, spend an average of about 10 million yuan on advertising every day.
However, the strategy of "burning money" did not seem to achieve the desired results. Zhang Yixue believes that the main reasons why online institutions are difficult to retain customers are as follows: First, online interaction is not as strong as offline, communication is not as smooth and convenient as offline, and children are difficult to have a strong sense of dependence on teachers; Second, the online training score raising effect is poor, and it is not easy to obtain parental recognition; Third, the management of teachers by institutions is mostly based on online, which is difficult to communicate and supervise effectively; Fourth, according to past experience, the renewal rate obtained from the interview with parents is far higher than that of telephone or video communication, but the actual operation of the interview is very difficult.
For the profit dilemma of online education, some investors believe that the problem should be solved from two aspects: first, in the face of the high cost and high turnover rate of teachers, standardized courses should be developed; Second, find accurate customer acquisition channels. At present, the accuracy and retention rate of Internet promotion are generally low.
Supervision "Tight Hoop Curse"
In the profit dilemma, regulation is not only a hammer to break the "speculative dream" of unqualified enterprises, but also a catalyst to accelerate the development of the market towards a more standardized and student-centered direction.
As for how to supervise, Han Lifu, a researcher of the Chinese Academy of Educational Sciences, said: "First, training institutions should establish a sense of high quality and implement the corresponding national policies and requirements. In addition to focusing on the acquisition of students' knowledge and learning ability, institutions should also care about the physical and mental development of students, including the cultivation of morality, social responsibility and personality. Second, we should strengthen the training of teachers and improve their quality. The teachers in major institutions are uneven. Generally speaking, they are knowledge teachers rather than ability teachers, lacking professional training. Third, conduct process supervision on training institutions. Specify the supervision department of each type of training institution, and the department shall properly carry out inspection, evaluation and assessment. In the future, both online and offline training should be standardized.
Song Shanyan, the dean of the Teachers' Education College of Hunan Normal University, said: "The implementation of the record review system, the implementation of the investigation and rectification and the improvement of the supervision mechanism proposed in the Opinions are very good, and the key is to implement them in place. In the operation system of the improvement of the supervision mechanism, the first is to strictly control the access to online training, and the second is to constantly focus on daily supervision and continuous improvement."
The addition of the "tight hoop curse" of supervision will inevitably lead to the gradual elimination of a number of online education enterprises that do not have the ability of self hemopoiesis, have a chaotic teaching and research system, and blindly "burn money", thus realizing the "self purification" of the market.
Zhang Lijun, an online education investor, said: "It is worth investing in online education companies that really care about learners, pay attention to long-term teaching effects rather than short-term interests, can use technology to improve the personalization and cost performance of education resource supply, and use technology to help solve the fairness and scarcity of education resources."
For the future development direction, Han Lifu believes that online training institutions should make changes in the following aspects: first, change their teaching philosophy, so that students can move from teaching before learning to learning before guiding, from passive learning to active learning, from solo learning to team cooperation learning, from informed teaching to active constructive learning; The second is to improve the guidance mode, from the traditional knowledge explanation teaching to the ability cultivation teaching, to guide students to obtain learning ability. However, the current online training institutions cannot operate in guiding students to acquire learning ability, which is also a major challenge for online training.
Song Shanyan said that the outstanding teachers emerging from online training are important high-quality resources, and this team should not be rejected, but should open up a green channel. It is suggested that the government and schools organize the selection of excellent teachers to give play to their own educational expertise and advantages, create online training courses, provide high-quality online public education resources, serve students, and promote education fairness.
(Yang Qing, Li Li and Zhang Yixue are pseudonyms)
(Editor in charge: Huang Lingli, Chen Jian)
