Internet+Education is committed to promoting Internet-based learning and training methods. At present, the Internet has widely penetrated into the fields of education and training such as early childhood education, preschool education, primary and secondary schools, universities/graduate students, studying abroad, vocational examinations, vocational skills, children’s foreign languages, adult foreign languages, interest education and comprehensive education. From the big market category, it mainly includes online academic education, online study abroad education, online K12 education, online vocational qualification and skills education. Among them, online academic education and online study abroad education have a relatively large market scale because of the high degree of curriculum standardization, which is conducive to giving full play to the advantages of online education.
The online education market is growing steadily.
In recent years, with the continuous improvement of China’s informatization level, the online education market has shown an accelerated growth trend. In 2004, China’s online education market was about 14.3 billion yuan, and it reached 98.1 billion yuan in 2013, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 21.2% in the past 10 years. According to GSV report and estimation, the scale of online education industry in China is only one-fifth of that in the United States, and the market structure of sub-sectors is quite different. The largest proportion of online education in China is training education (53.0%), followed by basic education (35.94%). In the United States, the proportion of basic education in online education is close to 50%, while the online training business is only 8%. In addition, the proportion of online education on mobile terminals in the United States is higher. Online education users in China prefer to use online education platform (61.4%), followed by online schools (37.0%), and the proportion of App usage is still relatively low. The proportion of App usage in the United States is much higher than that in China, and the proportion of online schools is about half that in China.
With the development of mobile Internet and the popularity of smart terminals, the scale of mobile Internet users in China has shown a rapid growth trend, and the number of mobile Internet users has surged. Generally speaking, the scale of mobile Internet users is much larger than that of fixed Internet broadband access users, and the advantages of the former are gradually increasing. At the same time, among all the respondents, nearly 40% of learners use mobile terminals to study, and nearly 51% of learners use mobile terminals to search online learning content, which shows that users who use mobile terminals to search online learning resources have reached a certain scale, but because of the lack of large-scale mobilization of course platforms and high traffic charges, PC-side learners still dominate. It is estimated that in the next five years, the compound annual growth rate of online education industry in China will reach 31.7%, of which the compound annual growth rate of online education on mobile terminals is 52%. According to Tiantuo Consulting, the online education market in 2017 was around 300 billion yuan. With the continuous expansion of the scale of netizens and the cultivation of online learning habits of online education users, the scale of users will continue to grow, and it is expected to reach 120.326 million by 2017.
In this context, Internet giants and traditional educational institutions have accelerated their layout or transformation. According to the statistics of venture capital and M&A database of Capital Lab, there were 291 online education venture capital events in 2014, and the disclosed transaction amount was US$ 1.86 billion. Compared with 2013, the investment amount increased by 46% and the transaction amount nearly doubled. There were 84 M&A incidents, and the disclosed transaction amount was USD 4.28 billion. Compared with 2013, the number of M&A increased by 127%, and the transaction amount tripled. There are three venture capital investments of more than $100 million: Insight Venture Partners and others brought $135 million in Series B financing to Pluralsight, an online IT education platform; TutorGroup received $100 million in financing from Qiming Venture Capital; Dude Solutions, a service provider of teaching facilities and IT management, was financed by Huaping’s investment of US$ 100 million.
In 2014, venture capital and M&A of online education in China continued to make great efforts, and the investment of venture capital in this field far exceeded that in 2013: 86 venture capitals, an increase of 195%; The investment was US$ 480 million, an increase of 584%. Among them, there are 14 cases of investment of more than 10 million US dollars. The online education M&A in China showed a high activity this year: there were 29 M&A incidents, an increase of 207% over the previous year; The amount of M&A was US$ 590 million, an increase of 126% over the previous year. At the beginning of 2014, first, Alibaba led the VIPABC； under the Tutorgroup, an international internet education giant; Then YY announced the establishment of "100 Education" and made great strides in the Internet education industry. Among them, Lei Jun will invest more than 1 billion yuan. Subsequently, BAT has been incubating internally, or acquiring platforms and content and tool products externally, accelerating the layout in the Internet education industry. In addition to large PE and Internet companies, in 2014, we saw more domestic listed companies such as Century Dingli, Senma Clothing, Tuowei Information, Shenzhou Taiyue, Lisichen, etc., and increased the layout of online education through mergers and acquisitions.
In addition, traditional educational institutions are also actively moving closer to the Internet. As the object of subversion, the traditional educational institutions represented by New Oriental and Good Future (formerly known as learning and thinking) are accelerating to move closer to the Internet. New Oriental, a traditional English training institution, also announced a cooperation with Tencent in 2014 to accelerate the development of Internet education business. At the same time, set up a live broadcast platform Cool Learning Network. In the future, we have increased our investment in Internet education business since last year. Its online school Xuesisi’s annual income in 2014 is expected to exceed 100 million yuan, double the income in 2012.
The key direction of "internet plus" education;
Explore new ways of providing educational services.
The development of Internet education is not only related to the trillion-scale education consumption market, but also related to major issues of people’s livelihood such as education equity and equalization of public education resources. In the service of "internet plus" for the benefit of the people, it is clearly necessary to further promote the exploration of new educational service supply modes and promote the interactive integration of the Internet with educational institutions and training institutions. As far as the specific content is concerned, it mainly involves the following four key directions:
-Encourage the development of digital educational resources based on the Internet platform.
The first is to encourage the network transformation of social education and training institutions, encourage existing training institutions to make full use of existing offline training resources, expand the training scope through online and offline interaction, and improve the utilization efficiency of offline training resources. The second is to encourage Internet companies to cooperate with social education and training institutions, make full use of the advantages of platform resources of Internet companies, guide user traffic for social training institutions, and establish a win-win online training ecosystem. Thirdly, Internet companies are encouraged to innovate education and training services, develop large-scale socialized training mode by releasing the professional skills of a wider range of social individuals, develop personal training brands while reducing the supply of training and consumption cost, and create more entrepreneurial employment opportunities.
-Encourage schools to explore new modes of network education.
Vigorously set up special classes, famous teachers’ classes and famous online classes to promote the sharing of high-quality educational resources between urban and rural areas. Facing the needs of education and teaching at all levels, we will build high-quality digital educational resources with distinctive features and rich contents, develop courseware materials and production tools that are deeply integrated into subject teaching, and improve various resource libraries. Strengthen inter-school exchanges and cooperation, build a platform for sharing high-quality digital educational resources and achievements, and realize the open sharing of high-quality educational resources in the region. Promote digital education and teaching, explore a new mode of education and teaching characterized by digitalization of teaching materials, networking of resources, individualization of teaching, autonomy of learning, and virtualization of environment, and encourage and support qualified primary and secondary schools to carry out new education methods such as flipping classrooms by relying on the Internet education platform. Develop modern distance education and network education, provide convenient, flexible and personalized information learning environment for learners, and promote the construction of lifelong learning system and learning society.
-Exploring new ways to provide public education services.
At this stage, most online education institutions in China simply transfer offline content to the Internet in the form of words, images and videos, which can only be knowledge infusion. The development of Web2.0 technology, especially the emergence of social media, provides the possibility to meet the interactive needs of learners in the learning process. Encourage Internet companies to fully connect educational institutions, that is, connect classrooms, and develop the service model of education O2O. On the one hand, it provides socialized online learning space for learners and creates a good online learning experience for learners; On the other hand, it is necessary to diagnose learners’ learning problems with the help of big data in online learning space, and use rich offline teachers to solve students’ problems scientifically. In particular, it is necessary to promote new ways of service supply in the fields of basic education and vocational education.
-Promote the new learning mode of online open courses.
In order to actively adapt to the new development trend of large-scale online open courses around the world and face the new opportunities and challenges in the reform and development of higher education, the Ministry of Education issued the Opinions on Strengthening the Application and Management of Online Open Courses in Colleges and Universities, supporting the construction of public service platforms for online open courses, encouraging the sharing of course resources and application data among public service platforms, creating an open and cooperative online teaching and learning space, encouraging colleges and universities to use the public service platform for online open courses, and encouraging the public service platform to cooperate with the teaching platform of the National Open University to provide quality courses for lifelong education. Encourage platform builders to cooperate with universities to build and use online course big data to provide high-quality and efficient all-round or personalized services for teachers, students and social learners in universities. At the same time, promote the credit recognition and credit management system innovation of online open courses. Colleges and universities are encouraged to formulate standards for determining the teaching quality of online open courses, incorporate online courses recognized by our school into training programs and teaching plans, and formulate methods for evaluating the teaching effect of online courses and methods for determining the credits for students taking online courses. On the premise of ensuring the quality of teaching, colleges and universities are encouraged to carry out online learning, the combination of online learning and classroom teaching and other ways of credit identification, credit conversion and learning process identification. (Li Qiangzhi)