This article is from WeChat public account: fuel economy (ID: rancaijing) , author: Meng Yanuo, editor: fan Chang weeks, from the head of FIG: IC photo


Public schools across the country have started taking online classes one after another on February 10. More than 600,000 teachers in more than 300 cities have transformed into anchors. For the first time with online teaching, some teachers were at a loss for a moment and became the protagonists of the internet segment, chaos like beings.

In response to the suspension policy, several leading online education institutions have donated free public welfare courses to elementary and middle school students across the country. At the same time, a battle for traffic without smoke was also erupting.

In this epidemic, offline training institutions that have been hit harder, choose to close the store to watch or urgently move the courses online, praying that they can survive the difficulties. Some educational institutions have died unfortunately due to radical expansion and cash flow disruption. Brothers of established IT training institutions have declared bankruptcy, and the Mingda language capital chain has been closed and closed down.

In the secondary market, the influx of large amounts of traffic and the surge in demand for online education have made online education favored by capital. A few days before the opening of the A-share market, online education stocks continued to rise and fall for several consecutive days. In the US and Hong Kong stock markets, New Oriental Online, Good Future, Who Learned From, Netease Youdao and other online education concept stocks also rose very fierce.

This epidemic has raised society’s awareness of online education, and at the same time, it has also accelerated online education.

Unexpected capacity expansion of infrastructure and teachers under traffic peaks

Starting on January 22, ClassIn back-end registries that provide online classroom live broadcast systems for educational institutions have begun to surge. The highest number of registered students in a day exceeded 1.6 million.The number of students online at the time exceeded 350,000. Compared to the usual peak learning period, the number of users has suddenly increased by nearly 10 times.

“In the beginning, our best choice was to expand the capacity to 3-5 times, but as the number of users increased, it increased to 10 times, and then to 30 times. Now it has reached the million level.

Gu Yan, co-founder of ClassIn, told Ran Cai.

Like ClassIn, on the first day of elementary and high school, almost all service platforms that carry online courses experienced large-scale stalls and delays. Ape Counseling posted on its Weibo. The platform flooded a total of 5 million users on the first day of the course, causing network congestion and stuttering. A variety of software, such as Dingguo and Tencent, which provide platforms for educational institutions, have also become stuck and collapsed. Faced with the surge in the number of students in the short term, various platforms have undergone emergency expansion.

Gu Yan explained to Ran Cai Finance that, in general, platforms will not be blindly expanded, and technical reserves need to be made in advance to help the platform reach higher goals. In addition to bandwidth issues, the platform also needs a stable underlying software architecture and physical resource server support when expanding the platform. On the one hand, during this time, bandwidth resources are relatively tight. In addition to online education platforms, some conference video software platforms also require a lot of bandwidth. On the other hand, during the Spring Festival, business was basically in a paralyzed state, and some physical resources were difficult to buy in a short time.

ClassIn was tested for network stability in the early winter vacation. According to common sense, the platform’s online resources, cloud servers, and bandwidth all need to be debugged for about two weeks before going online, but this time is completely “while driving an airplane while repairing the engine”.

“A lot of people joked that we belonged to epidemic stocks, and what everyone saw was the increase in the number of our users, but we also invested a lot in doing this.” Gu Yan said. ClassIn hasn’t had time to calculate this account yet. When it was decided to continue the expansion, there was no time to calculate the account at all.

Emergency investments on some head platforms exceed the ten million yuan level. In a recent interview, Li Xin, vice president of Ape Coaching, said in an interview that because of the provision of free live broadcast classes, the bandwidth cost this month will exceed 100 million, and all resources available in the market have been shorted out. If the data continues to rise, you can only seek help from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Already.

After the infrastructure problems of the platform have been resolved, the teaching staff has become more prominent and has become a major problem.

The influx of a large number of users in a short period of time has put the platform under great pressure on teachers. A number of online education institutions have told Ran Cai that in the past month, almost all teachers haveSpeed ​​is surprisingly fast. During class, teachers and students write and communicate simultaneously on the platform’s blackboard, making learning more efficient. The epidemic has boosted the motivation of offline education institutions to try online teaching, and has accelerated the integration of online and offline teaching.

But at this stage, offline training institutions are still the hardest hit among educational institutions. Not only do they have to face the pressure of rent, but also the difficulty for teachers and students to attend classes. Teacher recruitment and training cannot be carried out at the original speed. The online education institutions giants open free courses, which is also an impact on offline institutions.

In Luo Yuan ’s view, the epidemic is a double-edged sword for the development of online education. Everyone will find some shortcomings while experiencing online courses, such as online class rollovers. This will also make the shortcomings more exposed. Parents The choice is more rational. For some companies that focus on content and services, it may become a node of development.

Gu Yan also believes that the secondary epidemic is a preview of the development of online education in the next two to three years. After the epidemic, for the third-party education platform institutions, the number of new users is left, but for the institutions is the recognition of the online education model. The opportunities and challenges faced by all are coexisting.

“In the past, in the entire education market in the country, most parents were still relatively new to family education. Only 20% of parents were willing to actively try online education, but I predict that this proportion will increase to 50% in the future.” Zeng Pengxuan, the founder of Walnut Programming, told Ran Cai that this time is not good for online education in the short term. As customers and the market are educated, there will be a long-term effect.

Xu Chengcheng, the founder of iLearning, believes that the current stage is only accelerating the integration of offline education and online education.

“Like SARS, although e-commerce has risen, it has not completely replaced offline consumer behavior, and so has education.”

This article is from WeChat public account: fuel economy (ID: rancaijing) , author: Meng Yana, editor: Zhou Yifan