This article is from WeChat official account:Q&A (ID: chuhaiwenda), original title: “How does the online education industry make a difference? “Author: Du Yi Meng, Head Figure from: Vision China
Not only is the domestic online education in full swing, the heat wave of going overseas has also swept many important markets in Europe, America, Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, and the Middle East. The objective boost of the epidemic has caused a surge in online users.
Is this still a track to jump into? What are the problems with the rapid development of the industry? What are the factors that make companies stand out from the crowd? Can China’s dual-teacher courses and online major courses be promoted in emerging markets?
In the 20th Overseas Alumni Association last week, we invited iconic companies in language, Stem, tutoring and other categories, as well as institutions that focus on education to talk about online education opportunities in China and overseas. A discussion was held on the topic of “Online Education for Iterative Growth in the Red Sea”. =
The article involved some industry practitioners who participated in the discussion of this classmate meeting: (Pinyin alphabetical order)
Ye Ruizhi, Founder and CEO of Guiding Gang
Huang Chao, co-founder of Haidao Education, CGO
Miao Xiaocheng, Founder and CEO Guan Chunhua
Overseas C-end director of a leading online education company
Vipkid Senior Vice President-International Business Center Xu Xiaofei
Liu Kai, founder of Yingmei Consulting
Lin Shuqun, Director of Investment and Financing of Programming Cat
Yin Yijie, Investment Manager of New Oriental Strategic Investment
The following text is the wonderful Q&A of the guests:
What are the different competitive landscapes faced by different markets?
Vipkid Xu Xiaofei
North America is a very high-quality market. First of all, North America has a large population base, strong market payment capabilities, and a relatively high Internet penetration rate. These are its advantages. And the United States and Canada can be viewed as one market, because their language and cultural backgrounds are very close, which is a very high-quality direction.
Challenge: The cultural and operational costs are relatively high. For example, we will definitely need to have some local startup teams, or even local content teams. If we drive the North American market from the domestic headquarters, the requirements for the domestic headquarters talents are also relatively high, the cultural understanding of the language, and the overseas Talent management and recruitment in the North American market are all demanding.
The Asian market is very fragmented. Japan and South Korea are developed and mature markets. Although these two countries are very small, their investment volume and maturity in the education industry are actually very high. The Internet penetration rate is relatively high and the willingness to educate is strong, but facing the problem of an aging population, the birth rate of newborn babies is relatively low, resulting in fierce competition in the stock market.
Southeast Asia’s ability to pay is uneven, and language and cultural differences are very large, so we can choose a market with a relatively large population base. Indonesia and Vietnam have a relatively large population base, but the ability to pay is one thing worse than China’s. Big cut.
The increasingly rich global education market
India is a populous country, but its barriers to entry are high. It is very unique and the gap between the rich and the poor is very large. We seem to have a large population base and seem to be a market with a relatively high ceiling, but in fact, if you really subdivide products here, you will find that there will be very large Challenges.
The European market is very individual, each country is unique, and each population base is small. For online education products, it is impossible to completely replace a student’s complete learning experience. It must match the student’s on-campus education, and even complement each other with part of the offline educational institutions for extracurricular tutoring.
So for the European market, where there are many countries with a low population base, and a relatively low growth rate, the challenge to enter is even more difficult, especially at the level of operation and content.
Haidao Education Huang Chao
In our coaching track, local competitors are mainly Coursera. The difference between them and Haidao is that they are a relatively light platform model, which uses a tool-based approach to meet the needs of training excellence and replenishment.
U.S. market: The online education market for college students in the U.S. is estimated to be between US$5-10 billion, and there is an incremental market. There are two breakthroughs, one is the way of online tutoring, and the other is to think about the technology of searching questions in China. If it can provide better service effects than local products, there is a chance.
Emerging markets: We have studied Egypt and the demand is divided into K12 and college students. The demand for K12 is still there, but it is not clear whether the online tutoring method can adapt to the Egyptian market. The idea of finding a good result in Egypt to change their lives is not as strong as college students in Australia and the United States. So more still look at K12.
New Oriental battle investment Yin Yijie
Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asian countries are more convenient and easier for Chinese companies that want to go overseas, whether it is from the environment such as exam-oriented education, the characteristics and purpose of student learning, or the geographical location.
Japanese love and hate English learning
Selecting a regional market also needs to consider local network facilities and other infrastructure. For example, India has some sinking lower-tier cities, and their network coverage or high-speed network coverage is not that strong. This will also affect the penetration of online education.
You also need to consider the local market competition environment. For example, in India, BYJU’S is a product with a very high market share. It will sell through very strong ground sales, and even enter the user’s home. So some of its accumulation in human resources, including the barriers established by channels, is actually a problem that our Chinese companies want to go out, which need additional consideration.
Miao Xiaocheng Guan Chunhua
There are two core keywords that we have been thinking about. The first keyword is sinking, and the second keyword is going to sea.
Actually, in the current domestic first- and second-tier cities, of course, we will also consider some overseas Chinese in the same range as domestic first- and second-tier cities. So the so-called overseas market is not aimed at overseas Chinese, but refers to markets such as Americans in North America.
Currently, Miao Xiaocheng’s main programming track is placed in a competitive landscape like first- and second-tier cities in China. But I believe everyone will understand that the competition in the current track is actually very fierce whether it is English, mathematical thinking, programming, or k12 mathematics.
So I believe that many companies are actually focusing their vision or focus on some sinking markets or overseas markets. When we are in this area, we have been thinking about whether there are some opportunities in this area.
A wealth of Stem offline courses in the United States
Then let me share it from another angle. I think we are also thinking about what are the possible points of concern if we go to overseas markets, what problems we need to solve, and what are our advantages. ?
For example, if we are going to do North America, we may be thinking about the size of the current track in the North American market, and what is the way to cut into the current volume?
Because the situation in the North American market is still different from that in China, is the domestic education method based on training and the United States platform-based or self-directed learning method completely complete? The same?
The second one is the problem of the supply side, because we are actually doing small classes. Our small class is definitely to solve the problems of the teachers on the supply side. The current teacher’s problems are actually no more than a solution that can be thought of. There are only a few, and I can share with you. The first is directly in North America, the second is actually in India, the third is in China, and the fourth may be in some countries in Southeast Asia.
At present, it seems unrealistic to put it in India; if it is put in the United States, there is a cost problem; if it is put in the country, we are now doing some thinking in this area, but in fact, this part of the country The cost of teachers is not low, and there is a natural problem with English.
If a teacher needs to understand programming and also be able to teach programming in English, I think it will be difficult for us to do standardized courseware or talent selection and training in the long run. All will still settle on a cost issue.
India has become a human center for many online companies due to its low cost
The third problem is also the problem of customer acquisition that we have a headache. Of course, the problem of customer acquisition will actually be split into two. The first is the market side and the second is the sales side.
On the market side, for domestic companies like us, I think there is an advantage that is actually copy from China to America.
Because I think that in the dimension of customer acquisition by domestic online education companies, many of these attempts or understandings are actually very good and very deep, so do we have the opportunity to directly copy these corresponding models?
But our disadvantage is that, in fact, in the current environment in the United States, this method of direct copying in the past may not be realistic in China. For example, it may not be possible to copy directly in the past. If the store sells directly to buy If so, how do the channels of purchase come and go?
The entire privacy protection section of the United States is actually different from the domestic environment, so this section is actually some of the more headaches for our market. The sales side is easier to understand, because we are in the form of live classes, and the unit price per customer will be relatively higher than that of recording or AI or dual teachers. So the core of our entire sales method is Store sales.
For some other models, the unit price of some customers determines that they may be able to sell through some online sales. The way of store sales has actually become a headache for us on the sales side. So today I will also share with you our thoughts on some of the risks that may exist in the process of landing this matter.
How to give users the best experience?
Vipkid Xu Xiaofei
The integration of local culture, local operations and insight and understanding of users. Once this part is resolved, one of the advantages it produces is that you can acquire customers at a lower cost and operate at a lower cost, which enables users to increase satisfaction and enhance the life cycle value of our product.
As far as overseas business is concerned, when you choose your target market, you must gain localized knowledge and insights from the front-end growth operations. In this caseOnly by combining the two aspects can the overall strategy of going out to sea succeed.
A head online education company
To make products, we must first understand who our users are. If we come to classify our online education products, we should classify them from the perspective of the user’s overall learning motivation, some of the user’s needs, and its scenes.
The motivation is different, it will affect our next product positioning, including how to enter the market, what kind of products we make, whether we are making film and television products or hobby products.
How to do the interaction and experience of our products? We need to consider how large we can reach the entire market.
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Internally driven learning. It should be more partial to content and presentation form. The more high-quality content, the better, the richer the better, and the easier to learn, the better. For example, like keep. Keep is actually doing fitness, but in fact, when we open keep, it will have a variety of content, various training methods, and his user stickiness is also good.
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Externally motivated learning. For example, we are going to take exams, to take grades, and even some vocational skills improvement. The core focus of such a product is actually the process and the result. How do we strengthen the entire process and results during the entire product design interaction and other experience, and help the user complete his learning and complete his entire learning goal, I think the entire product can stand out.
The core of education-improve yourself
Guide Jun Ye Ruizhi
We emphasize the role of people in the culture of tutoring. In our publicity, we emphasize that we are here to accompany students through a special period of life, not just to train and improve students’ academic performance.
Then a more basic aspect of culture is the human aspect. In our understanding, education services, especially the service-oriented rather than technology-oriented industry, education services need to be implemented by a living person, including teachers, consultants, and head teachers. Then the overall personality of the team determines the service. Tonality.
Education I don’t think there is much creativity in the technical and operational aspects. Differentiation, in addition to market positioning, user group positioning, and product positioning, a very important difference is the team’s tonality. The selection of people is the basis of tonality. Therefore, when recruiting and training, we will pay great attention to their understanding and philosophy of education.
Although it is a start-up company, we also emphasize hard work rather than wolfishness. For example, our corporate culture summarizes 4 words, the first word is sincerity.
What trend is the application of technology?
Yingmei Consulting Liu Kai
Some technical products are gradually applied to home scenes. During the epidemic, we were not only exposed to some common terminals such as mobile phones, pads and computers, but also some terminals including TVs.
TV used to act more as a one-way content resource platform for content output. But in the past year, we have also seen that some TV manufacturers, including some education companies, have begun to attach importance to or have put some of their educational products on TV terminals, although currently in terms of their overall traffic ratio, or the ratio of users paying It is not very high, but after all, it has at least a certain amount of holdings and at least a certain stock market.
Some learning experiences that can’t be displayed on mobile phones and Pads can be extended on this, such as sports education.
Because it relates to its geographic location or its offline scenes, it is very important. In the family, is it possible for children to move and jump, or even do some simple exercises? I think this can also generate some demand. With some changes in technology, some new demands may be released.
Haidao Education Huang Chao
Some unchanging things, if we can solve these standardization problems through technology, I think this will become the core competitiveness of Chinese education going overseas. Including my recent research on the US market, some of the best products running in the US actually revolve around this kind of mathematics, taking photos to search for questions, and then answer the questions in the Flash Card model, which requires certain technical capabilities.
So if you really want to compete with the US market on the global education track, I think AI is the core competitiveness.
Search Questions on Screen
Vipkid Xu Xiaofei
The Chinese market has accumulated a lot of experience in the application of AI technology in education. Overseas, such as North America, their AI technology is indeed very developed, but a large part of AI also depends on the accumulation of data and the continuous improvement of the application of algorithms in specific learning scenarios.
So the application of AI in online education must also be combined with educational scenarios and educational content.
So I think China’s overall supply of technology-related talents is an absolute advantage, and the essence of Internet education is a service industry, which requires a lot of time investment and business, users and service teams. A lot of running-in.
I don’t see any market at the moment. Even the United States, which is technologically advanced, can hardly lead China.
While the epidemic has brought about the rapid development of the industry, are there any problems?
Yingmei Consulting Liu Kai
The epidemic must be good for the entire education industry, but there are also uncertainties. Because the entire education industry, We believe that at present it is not an absolute distinction between online and offline. In the future, there will be more integration of online and offline.
So if there are a lot of bankruptcies in offline institutions in the future, or if everyone’s trust in offline education is not high, it may also affect the development of some online education.
There are actually several factors worth thinking about: First of all, how do we switch to such an online and offline scene in a short time? In addition, how should the entire service process be designed?
Some educational institutions have gradually learned how to integrate online and offline. However, whether some small and medium-sized institutions have the ability and how much they are willing to spend to achieve such a capability may also need to take time. The advancement of educational technology covers these small and medium-sized institutions, and it is a long process for them to survive.
The boosting role of the epidemic on online education
Programming cat Lin Shuqun
The epidemic has an accelerated effect. Programming education itself has relatively strong online attributes. In fact, what this year’s epidemic has brought to the entire industry is actually a penetration rate under construction. It will reach 100% at one time. We currently believe that the online penetration rate of programming education will actually exceed offline, exceeding 50%. the above.
During the rapid development process brought about by the epidemic, how to keep users on your product is a very important question. It still depends on your own products and course content.
The future opportunity pattern of the industry? How to vote?
New Oriental battle investment Yin Yijie
FromAt the user level, from the perspective of age groups, most domestic companies are engaged in K12, and there are businesses such as public examinations. This kind of business has a very obvious feature, which is pure test-taking purpose. Their ultimate effect is basically to raise points. The learning purpose is very clear. In addition, some localized teaching, research and teaching are also needed.
The accumulation of domestic enterprises in this area, including the accumulation of personnel supply, is difficult to replicate successfully overseas.
In the younger age group, children aged 9 or even under 12, their learning goals are not so single, not just to improve their scores, they may have different exercise directions in different subjects, such as concentration, Logical thinking, or language expression ability, the dimensions of evaluation will not be so single, then these will be a more universal education.
So for the global market, I think education for the younger age group will be a better opportunity to go overseas.
Adult education is also divided into two aspects. The first is international students, because the overseas study business is actually a very important business of New Oriental. Although it may now account for 30% or less of income, its future growth will also be It will affect the overall growth of New Oriental.
We are now biased towards a layout of the entire industry chain of studying abroad, from pre-study, such as language training, background improvement, application to some services after studying abroad, including an after-school tutoring after the student said he went to university, and Some local life services.
One way we do this may be through investment or mergers and acquisitions to cooperate with some local training institutions or some institutions that provide services after studying abroad, so as to provide our users with a more complete The whole chain of services is actually a way to go overseas.
The main global track of education (from Navitas)
In addition, adults have occupationsEducation, but vocational education may be mentioned by the previous guests. For example, in IP, our advantages are not as obvious as in the United States, so maybe this area still needs a better product.
Of course, because of vocational education, it also means that students will have a stronger sense of autonomy in learning. Therefore, the degree of dependence on teachers, including possible sales, is not so high. This form of relatively light human input will be more suitable for sea.
Disciplinary level: For the younger age groups, English, mathematical thinking, programming, quality education, including Chinese, these subjects have many opportunities, because overseas Chinese, or other local people, yes These aspects have some requirements, of course, they need to be equipped with some localized teaching and research and understanding of local users, so that this product can be more suitable for some local conditions.
Product form level: Like curriculum-oriented products, its characteristic is that the customer unit price is very high. It is a class that charges thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars at once through advance payment. This kind of high customer unit price It requires strong sales intervention, whether it is local promotion or store sales, or this way of community operation, it is a labor-intensive input.
So the initial investment is very high, and it will be a slower and more difficult way. In addition, curriculum-based products usually require the intervention of teachers, and it is difficult to provide teaching in this area.
As for the productized ones, like Hong En Education has also been launched recently, they will also think about transforming to productization, such as making a subscription model, or embedding more complete functions in the product to increase user stickiness. Let users do this renewal.
He prefers a self-learning method. Perhaps the Chinese people’s acceptance of self-learning is relatively low, but many overseas countries are very adaptable to this model. Such a product has its own user life cycle. It is relatively limited, so after it has made the sea, it is more suitable to make the sea regardless of the form of the product or its own commercialization.
Subscription products have four dimensions that need to be broken through
Grand View Capital Xu Ruicheng
We researched online education. The first impression is that online education is a very complicated track, which is different from other tracks. For example, how to divide these categories like games is very clear. , It is very clear whether it is match three or strategy.
But in the online education track, we found that the way it is divided is very three-dimensional. From the main business level, there are content, tools, services, etc.
Then this model also has B2B and B2C. In fact, the logic of division is different. If you divide it from the service object or the content category itself, it will be more detailed, such as language, programming, stem, which are all different Divide the dimensions, including technology like certificate, like Coursera they do.
So we feel that our industry is a highly complex industry.
So we look at the project mainly focusing on three dimensions: one is customer acquisition, which has been mentioned by many guests just now; the second is content generation, these two are the two most important and most basic two aspects of an education platform. Piece.
The last dimension is the dimension of the so-called low-level demand logic. As far as education is concerned, the biggest low-level demand is “to apply what I have learned”. I just want to learn things and produce results. But in actual reality, the important demand is far more than this one.
For example, we found that many current products, especially in China and the United States, the underlying logic is not actually “learning to use”, many of them are actually “anxiety relief” and “killing time”. . Like in Silicon Valley, many parents don’t get off work at two o’clock in the afternoon, and their children have nowhere to go, so they put them in early education classes and extracurricular classes. In fact, they don’t ask you to learn anything, just to say that the time is passed.
There is no difference between these needs at the market level, so the ideal target I am more concerned about is to start with a small product with strong demand and strong feasibility, and then from this entrance to a different product line in the future , Or even upstream and downstream consumption or some overall life consumption.
Anxious parents are the driving force to pay for education
Finally, let’s talk about the U.S. The online education in the U.S. is actually very far behind the domestic one. Although many of the leading platforms Duolingo, Khan Academy, and Coursera are all established in North America, the online education penetration rate is actually higher. Generally speaking, it is still inferior to China as a whole, and its operations and products are far worse. Objectively speaking, it is an ideal market for going overseas.
In addition, in North America, “trafficking anxiety” and “balancing uneven education resources” are not as good as China. One aspect is that most middle-class parents in North America have fewer “tiger fathers and mothers”, and they are not too cold in these aspects of teaching assistants.
On the other hand, the reason is that education in the United States is relatively average and universal. There is a gap in education resources between China’s first-tier cities and fifth-tier cities, but in North America, the gap is much smaller, in remote counties And the big cities are relatively average as a whole.
So in the past, the platform for integrating resources that we saw was relatively slow and did not come out much. Like Khan Academy and even Ted, they are taking the path of accumulating knowledge and are not in a hurry.
I once saw an online education project at MIT, and after doing it for more than 20 years, I came out of the Angel Wheel, which is unimaginable in China. Therefore, companies need to adjust user needs and products accordingly when entering the US market.
Of course, in the future, we will definitely pay more attention to how to use the advantages of China and the United States to drive the development of global online education projects.
This article is from WeChat official account:Q&A (ID: chuhaiwenda) , Author: Du Yi Dream