Another “ground” battlefield.
文 | Shi An
Edit | Court 伶
In the summer of 2019, the “air battle” of the K12 online school was in full swing. The giants were busy pushing into the track of hundreds of billions of dollars. The ground teaching and training institutions were affected by the war and showed a strong sense of crisis.
A principal of a training institution that has just switched to the “offline double division” mode introduced that their organization has opened three chains in a third-tier city, and the brand reputation has been very good. However, since last autumn, he found that some old students with good grades began to lose. One question was that parents turned around and reported to the online school. The reasons were mainly concentrated on two points. One was “a famous teacher in Beijing” and the other was “the tutor was almost 24 hours. Back to the news, as passionate as a customer service.”
The online army is really coming. For the offline organization, “this feeling is like we are standing on the ground, watching them fight in the sky, playing fiercely, but you don’t know which day, a shell suddenly fell on your head. .”
An online school investor told 36Kr, “We can see the composition of students enrolled this summer, 70% of students in the 3rd, 4th and 5th tier cities. In fact, apart from learning and thinking, the school is mainly in the first and second line, we are other The proportion of competitors in the sinking market has reached more than 50%. The reason is very simple, vibrato, fast hands, circle of friends, headlines… Internet access is borderless and accurate enough for airdrops.” /p>
The gods fight the little devil to die. When the “new species” of “Online Masters and Counseling” appeared, and the K12 online school arms race was counted as “10 million advertisements, millions of students”, between the “giant” and “land” in the past ten years. The students competed for a sudden, and it seemed a little bit small.
The ground education institution does not intend to give up the confrontation, but is preparing for a “technical counterattack.”
The “offline double division” mode is a counterattack weapon. In a large screen, the first-line teacher gave live lectures online, and there was also a tutor inspector in the classroom. The product form of this “online teacher + offline assistant” mixed teaching was first called “double teacher class” and later changed to “Offline double division”, to distinguish the K12 online school “online teacher + assistant” online dual division mode.
The mode of the offline division has already appeared in 2016 and 2017. With the outbreak of the online school this year, it has once again attracted attention.
Some practitioners who believe that “education should face to face” see hope from the “offline double division”. They often do not recognize the pure online education, but there is no way to market in the pure line. Compete directly with the giants.
So on the ground, more and more offline organizations began to try to upgrade the “offline double division” equipment, join this “offline to the line” self-help and counter-attack.
Ground TechnologyLaw, the benchmark “network school”
The reason why the offline is so affected by the online, to a certain extent comes from the core competitiveness of line education: a strong interactive learning experience.
The founder of a network school told 36Kr, “It’s also an hour-long course. In the offline classroom, students’ attention can be concentrated for up to 20-30 minutes, but online learning will design more interaction and motivation points. In 1 hour, the students’ attention and interest points are firmly grasped. Students learn more in the unit time, and the learning effect will be better.”
Secondly, the online training of “masters + online marketing” in the air force is also a reason for the offline agencies to turn around.
To counterattack the line, the Internet people help traditional offline agencies find solutions: While retaining the advantages of the offline, help the traditional institutions to fill the short board on the line.
There was the “offline double division” mode: let the “teacher + teaching and research” in the first-tier cities empower the traditional institutions of the sinking market, and at the same time help them to add core competitiveness, that is, design interaction is stronger Learning experience.
A “online + offline” mix of teaching scenarios is:
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Students sit in the local training class, the tutors face-to-face inspectors, control the classroom, and guide the homework. On the big screen, the remote teachers are on the live broadcast class – both local real-life counseling and a line of teachers. Teaching quality;
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Students interact with online teachers in real time through the remote control or tablet in their hands. The teacher has a question, the student writes by button or e-book, and each student’s correct and incorrect data is fed back to the teacher in real time; the teacher starts the gamification practice, the student single or group competition, and sees the reward points of himself and his companions in real time.
An offline double-teacher classroom for an institution
The “offline double division” mode has also spawned a number of new players to enter, but the exploration of business models is different. The giants are biased towards self-employment, while the majority of startups choose toCan “under the line.”
New Oriental, Good Future, the earliest choice of “Double Teacher” Direct School to make innovative attempts – self-built campus and classroom, using their own online live teacher and offline tutor to standardize Teacher training and campus management.
“Since last year, New Oriental has implemented the online and offline dual-platform strategy, and ‘Double Division Oriental’ has been promoted to the Group’s strategic position, becoming another core business line for the expansion of New Oriental’s ground.” Jia Chunyi, the head of the division, said in an interview with 36Kr.
Last month, New Oriental just released its latest quarterly earnings report. The growth of the K12 sector is strong, and the stock price has risen by more than 20% in the short term. Although the dual division of the East does not reflect the core strategy of the group financially, the ambition of the giants in this field is still visible.
The direct mode of the giant entry is not suitable for small and medium players. The direct mode requires the same hard cost as the offline school district. At the same time, it also needs to add a full set of online live + interactive equipment, which is extremely demanding for capital, talents and management. Jia Chunyi also admitted that the single investment of the Oriental Shuangshi Direct School is not the responsibility of the general small and medium education institutions.
The company represented by Goss is taking a different approach and trying to adopt the S2B2C model to provide small and medium-sized training institutions with “offline double-skilled” products based on teachers, teaching and research, and interactive equipment to help organizations better serve students. This type of player also includes early-stage startups such as foreign teachers, tempering Fangtang language, and multi-learning (Qingguo double division).
“For small and medium-sized organizations, the scarce core resources are still good teachers, teaching and research and technical operations. We provide this part. Admissions, localization services and management, small institutions are fully capable of doing their own work.” Chuan told 36Kr, which is why Gao Si chose S2B2C mode.
Another consideration is “localization.” “Organizations that have offline stores and enrollment in local schools must be more familiar with local academic conditions and good at localized operations. The good things should be handed over to the cooperatives themselves, as a third party to help Xiao B improve in teaching and research. The short board, the value of the offline + online can really play out.”
Compared with the ability of giant companies to produce full-disciplinary output, early-stage startups often choose a “cut-in point” to capture the market segment.
In the three main subjects, “language” has the lowest participation rate compared to mathematics and English, and has become the entry point for priority selection.
Teng Yue Principal Online CEO Ji Jiguang told 36Kr that in the process of providing training services for the third and fourth line principals and dealing with small and medium-sized educational institutions, they found that language teachers were particularly short, and even many institutions did not offer language courses. But with the reform of the new college entrance examination policy, the language is in the Lord.The status of the discipline is becoming more and more important, the demand for language tutoring is growing rapidly, and the supply is extremely scarce, which makes the leaps and bounds see the opportunity.
Last year, the company officially launched the Chinese language dual-teacher product “Fang Tang Language”. With the channel resources and B-end service capabilities accumulated before, more than 200 organizations were cooperated within 9 months.
In addition to subject tutoring, there is an extremely scarce educational resource in the sinking market – foreign teachers. For the users of the sinking market, on the one hand, they are eager to try the foreign language teaching class, and on the other hand, the demand for the “test score effect” is stronger.
With the balance point of the two as a breakthrough, the foreign teacher is trying to use the “1.5 hours of offline courses + 0.5 hours of online teaching” to connect the training institution to the “foreign teacher double teacher” – the grammar is explained by the ground teacher in front. , back and foreign teachers training oral listening.
Founder Zheng Jinli told 36Kr that the small and medium-sized teachings will be cautious about the “energy” of the subject class, fearing that the users will be washed away. Initially, we chose to cut into the double division from the “professional foreign language” of the partial quality. We will not expand the curriculum, help the institutions to improve the enrollment characteristics and competitiveness, and it is easier to establish long-term trust and cooperation with the small and medium-sized education institutions.
The ground tech warfare is effective. After a group of double-player players entered the market, 36Kr learned from the industry that the renewal rate after the access to the offline divisions reached an average of 80%, and the C-class course continued to report an average of 75%.
In the longer term, the offline company will even hope that the future technical capabilities can be compared with the K12 network school. Therefore, regardless of the giants or early companies, when talking about the cost structure and profit model of the “offline double division”, there is no exception to mention the high investment in “technology research and development”.
Fang Ji language CEO Qi Jiguang told 36Kr to strengthen technology research and development. On the one hand, it is necessary to strive to achieve the “online” live broadcast quality and interactive experience. On the other hand, it is based on balancing the financial model, on the basis of no compromise experience. The current one-to-one model (one teacher to a small class), optimized to one-to-many (one teacher to multiple small classes), and even optimized to the future of a pair of thousands of people, and the final AI class model.
This is similar to the “model” dispute between the one-on-one, small class and big class in the early days of online education.
How far is the “window” of the offline division?
An interesting point is that in the mouths of many “offline double divisions” interviewed by 36Kr, talking about competitors, almost all of them mentioned “network school” without the confrontation between their peers.
In the face of the more threatening “new species,” the “offline alliance” has become a groupwarm.
Although the offline divisions use the online school as a benchmark, in fact, the track of the entire offline double division is still in a very early exploration period:
One is that the mode is not finalized.
The business model includes direct sales, S2B2C and a very small number of joining; the class has a pair of small classes, a pair of small classes, a pair of hundred people in a variety of forms; interactive experience with remote control, electronic Different equipments such as pens, tablets and learning machines; the teaching model is divided into two pairs of “online lecturer + offline assistant”, “pure online lecturer” single teacher, pure line tutor + online AI record In the course of broadcasting, there has recently been a three-master mode of “offline Chinese education + online AI teachers + online foreign teachers”.
These complex models and product forms are cross-combined and connected to small and medium-sized organizations across the country, but there is no distinctive distinction.
Because of this, the “offline double division” is difficult to define accurately, and in the broad sense is also called OMO (Online-Merge-Offline) online + offline mixed mode, which is almost the same as “online education” Thick graininess.
And return to the first few years of online education development: self-employed or platform? One-on-one, small class or big class? Live, recorded or AI pseudo live? Online teacher, or teacher lecture + counseling? Disputes continue. Until the mode of the online double-teacher class was verified, the players swarmed in, and the online school explosion that we saw today.
So, the current “offline double division” or OMO is very similar to the “model melee” period of early online education.
Second, demand has not broken out.
Although the players in the offline division are full of confidence in the future, at least at this stage, most of the offline teaching institutions still lack sufficient “upgrade” power.
36Kr surveyed the sales of several “offline double-skilled” startups. Among the customers who explicitly indicated that they refused to access the “offline double division”, the most feedback was: the business was not affected by any online, profit In good condition, it is not intended to expand.
The permeability of the K12 network school is still not high in the 3, 4 and 5 lines, and most of the offline institutions still do not feel the pressure at all. Perhaps in a few years, after the “online + offline” participation rate of the 3rd and 4th lines reaches a critical point of relative saturation, online and offline will enter the competition for stock users.
Secondly, compared to the rapid growth of online training, offline growth is much slower. Correspondingly, talents, capital, resources, etc. will all flow preferentially online.
With regard to the business model of the offline “S2B2C”, the small B always has a precaution against S, fearing that the users who have been recruited will be washed away, and even they will be directly annexed. The benefit sharing mechanism between S and B is not equal enough.The party’s trust relationship will always be sensitive.
In the market scale of tens of billions of online divisions, the head player’s annual revenue is not more than hundreds of millions. In the 600,000 small and medium-sized education institutions, there are several cooperation agencies of offline and double-player players. The total does not exceed 5,000, and the penetration rate is less than 1%.
The timing of “days,” “land”, and “humanity” seems to have not yet arrived.
One side is the exploration and collision of various modes within the industry. On the one hand, it is the round-scale war of online education, and the online school continues to penetrate the sinking market. When will the windshield of the offline double division come?
An investor judged that the day when the online line was really “hit” to the offline and the training organization had the strongest desire for survival, perhaps the “window” of the offline division.
It’s just that when the day really comes, it’s a gust of wind or a storm, it’s hard to say.
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