Editor | Egg Manager
Production | project financing
K 12 online education giants have made new moves in their transformation.
10 year 10 on October 20th, Ape Tutor announced that it has officially entered the to B intelligent education market, and will soon launch a new brand of educational technology "Flying Planet" for the government and schools to meet the technical and service needs of the whole teaching scene in public schools.
On the same day, the news of further expanding the B-end business layout came from Head Education. At present, its smart education service, high-quality course content after-school delay service and other school admission services have been launched in many parts of the country.
Why does the transformation of K 12 online educational institutions aim at the field of smart education? Will wisdom education be a good business in the post-double-reduction era? What "hard bones" need to be solved in this new market?
What is "wisdom education"?
Simply put, wisdom education, also known as "educational informatization", refers to the process of comprehensively and deeply applying modern information technology to promote educational reform and development, and the result will inevitably form a brand-new educational form-information education.
Educational informatization has two key functions: one is an important way to promote educational equity. Due to the obvious gap between the eastern and western parts of China and between urban and rural areas, the important purpose of educational informatization is to break through the time and space constraints and technical barriers through the popularization and application of information technology in the field of education and promote the delivery of high-quality educational resources to poor and remote areas.
The second is an important means to improve the quality of education. Educational informatization integrates top school resources, excellent teacher resources and rich material resources, which can realize cross-regional and cross-school dissemination and sharing of resources and solve the current situation of uneven distribution of resources; At the same time, educational informatization can break through the time and space limitation of educational environment and strengthen the connection between classroom and the real world.
Furthermore, educational informatization can meet the needs of classroom teaching, and intelligent devices can display abstract concepts more vividly, help students understand and digest, and help cultivate students' thinking ability.
However, it is not easy to give full play to the above key functions. In practice, we find that there is still much room for improvement in the educational balance in educational informatization.
According to the data released by the Ministry of Education, in 20 18, the average public budget for education in all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in China was about 97.7 billion yuan, and Jiangsu, Guangdong and other regions once exceeded 200 billion yuan, while economically backward areas such as Ningxia and Qinghai were less than 20 billion yuan.
In fact, the huge gap in educational funds between regions directly affects the investment level of educational informatization. Therefore, the current education informatization investment system linked to local finance is difficult to shorten the education level gap between developed and underdeveloped areas.
Speaking of educational informatization, we have to mention its two "eras"-the era of educational informatization 1.0 and the era of educational informatization 2.0.
Let's look at the information age of education 1.0 (2000 -20 17).
At present, the school mainly purchases hardware, which is the era of hardware popularization, and mainly realizes the construction goal of "three links and two platforms", that is, broadband network school-to-school communication, high-quality resources class-to-class communication, online learning space for everyone, public service platform for educational resources and public service platform for education management. Classroom teaching mostly uses tape recorders and video recorders as auxiliary equipment, and the penetration rate is low.
However, although 17 has initially completed the terminal deployment targets such as school network access and intelligent equipment, educational information products have not changed much in the "teaching and learning" link.
Look at the era of educational informatization 2.0 (from 20 18 to now).
At present, multimedia teaching equipment has become the dominant in the field of education. Multimedia devices such as multimedia central control system, touch screen integrated machine and tablet computer have become the main teaching equipment in the teaching field. The network teaching broadcasting and recording system has been integrated into the field of education, and the advantages of sharing educational information have brought great help to improve the teaching quality of teaching institutions in second-and third-tier cities and remote areas.
On April 20 18, the Ministry of Education issued the Action Plan of Education Informatization 2.0, which requires that the development goal of "three all, two high schools and one big school" should be basically realized by 2022, that is, all teachers should be covered by teaching application, all school-age students should be covered by learning application, and all schools should be covered by digital campus construction. The level of informatization application and information literacy of teachers and students should be generally improved, and an "Internet+education" platform should be built.
This action plan is a milestone, because it marks the beginning of China's education informatization from 1.0 era to 2.0 era.
At the same time, there is also a particularly important assertion in the action plan that "educational informatization should be regarded as an endogenous variable in the reform of the education system to support and lead the development of educational modernization", which is another brand-new orientation of the status and role of educational informatization after "Information technology has a revolutionary impact on educational development" proposed in the Outline of the National Medium and Long-term Education Development Plan (20 10-2020).
It should also be pointed out that education informatization 2.0 is a concept of a period, and its duration is uncertain, or 5 years or 10 years or even longer.
The global outbreak in 2020 further highlights the importance of educational informatization. The state emphasizes the reconstruction of traditional teaching mode with software, teaching resources and technology, which involves all-round changes in educational concepts, methods and systems.
At this point, the wave of educational informatization reform has prepared the hardware, software and people's minds for the arrival of smart education, especially since the introduction of the "double drop" policy, the curtain of domestic smart education has been opened, which is attracting major education giants.
In fact, after the "double reduction" policy, the transformation of K 12 teaching and training institutions into the track of smart education is not without foundation.
First of all, there is a great market space for intelligent education. According to bullet finance, in 2020, the national financial education funds will reach 4,292 billion yuan, of which 9% will be used for the construction of smart education. According to this calculation, the market size of smart education in China will be about 386.3 billion yuan in 2020, and it is expected to exceed 400 billion yuan in 20021year.
For K 12 online education giants, it is urgent to find a "second growth curve" after losing their important pillar business. Only when the new business is a sea can it sail on it; If it's just a small lake, it's hard to hold it up.
"It is no problem to be a 10 listed company on the intelligent education track." Chen Jing, vice president of Blue Elephant Capital Investment, told Bullet Finance.
Secondly, the policy of wisdom education is beneficial. Bullet Finance noted that only in July this year, two important policies were introduced.
1. On July 2 1, the Ministry of Education and other six departments issued the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Construction of New Education Infrastructure and Building a High-quality Education Support System, which mentioned that the new education infrastructure is a new infrastructure system guided by new development concepts, guided by informationization, facing the needs of high-quality education development, and focusing on information networks, platform systems, digital resources, smart campuses, innovative applications, credibility and security.
Then, on July 24th, the General Offices of the General Office of the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council issued the Opinions on Further Reducing the Students' Homework Burden and Off-campus Training Burden in Compulsory Education, clearly pointing out that it is necessary to strengthen the role of school education as the main front and improve the quality of classroom teaching, homework design and after-school service.
In addition, the strategy of K 12 online education institutions to switch to intelligent education is also favored by investment institutions.
In the past 10 months, Squirrel Ai completed a new round of financing. The investors are Greenland, Oriental State-owned Assets and CITIC, and all the investment funds have been received. One of the reasons why squirrel Ai will be invested is that investors value its development in the intelligent education sector and its breakthrough in intelligent hardware.
However, Chen Jing believes that it is not rational for K 12 teaching and training institutions to switch to the field of smart education.
Because to B or to G is a complex business, not a simple business. "The so-called' simple business' means that you only need to do your best in a certain link, but the business of to B or to G needs you to cover everything, and every link must be stronger." Chen Jing said frankly.
Since it is a "complex business", it means that the cycle of institutional services will be relatively long, and at the same time, it is necessary to have extremely high-quality customer service capabilities, which is not an "internal strength" that players can achieve overnight.
In addition to hoping to obtain more high-quality resources, the presence of K 12 teaching and training institutions will also play a complementary role for smart education players who focus on tools and management platforms.
Zhou Lin, founder of Xiaoyang Group, told Bullet Finance that the core advantages of K 12 teaching and training institutions are mainly embodied in the construction of content and resource system such as question bank, courseware, teaching and research, rather than the tools and management platform used by schools. "Their participation is actually a good supplement for us."
However, Zhou Lin also mentioned that their participation will have a great impact on those institutions that originally provided various intellectual resources for schools.
It is worth noting that the entry of K 12 teaching and training institutions will lead to intensified competition in the smart education industry. The intensification of competition may reduce the profits of existing wisdom education players.
In Chen Jing's view, if new players enter the market, developing intelligent education products and systems around the actual needs of front-line teachers will really help the latter. Otherwise, their participation has no practical significance for front-line teachers.
Objectively speaking, in the short to medium term, the challenges faced by players in the intelligent education industry will not be alleviated by the participation of online education giant K 12.
At present, it is generally believed in the industry that it is the primary task to enhance the local authorities' awareness of smart education. When smart education is promoted to public schools across the country, it is also necessary to properly handle the relationship between decision makers and payers-these two tasks may "convince" many players.
In addition, the challenge facing enterprises is how to manage cash flow well.
Insiders revealed to Bullet Finance that many public schools are willing to pay for infrastructure such as intelligent hardware, but are unwilling to pay for software. More importantly, to B or to G institutions usually face the problem of compensation, while to C institutions generally adopt the mode of paying first.
Chen Jing mentioned that if the order is within 50,000 yuan or100,000 yuan, it can be paid directly by the principal of the school, and once the order amount exceeds the above range, public bidding is required and the approval process is followed. Going through the approval process means that an account period will be generated.
"For example, an order of 500,000-2 million will take at least half a year to collect the money, and an order of 500 million will take at least three years to collect the money. Even some accounts receivable are in arrears for too long, and institutions can only deal with bad debts in the end. " She said.
According to her understanding, similar bad debts are more common in the industry. "many people think that institutions that choose to accept to B services have money and budget. Yes, institutions have money and budgets, but the problem is that institutions also have accounting periods. When most players enter this market, they simply don't realize how long the account period is and how much risk they have to bear. "
Of course, many intelligent education players are alleviating the problem of account period by raising the sales price. For example, intelligent education products with a cost of only 1000 yuan are sold to public schools as high as 1000 yuan, and the extra profit of 9,000 yuan is used to make contacts, motivate teachers, and draw commissions through channels to fill bad debts.
In addition, "how to find a balance between the needs of decision makers, payers and users" has become an insurmountable mountain for many smart education players.
This is because the decision makers, payers and users of smart education products or systems are separated and have their own needs. According to Chen Jing, the school decision-makers pay more attention to the enrollment rate, the quality of students and the characteristics of running a school, while the education bureau and other payers prefer cool, high-tech and selling smart education products or systems.
Teachers and other front-line users are more concerned about whether intelligent education products or systems are stable and operable, and whether they can reduce costs and increase efficiency. "Cool things may not work. Public schools are like the' Pinduoduo market', and many front-line teachers have functional requirements for products. " Chen Jing added.
It is worth mentioning that the biggest problem faced by the transformation of to-C institutions to G-end is that they cannot adapt to the completely unfamiliar and long decision-making chain under another organization and system. "They will not quickly understand the respective considerations of different roles such as the director of the Education Bureau, the principal and the teacher." Chen Jing said.
However, there is another problem in front of smart education players-how to realize the deep integration of technology and education and teaching.
In Zhou Lin's view, to achieve the above integration, institutions should not only understand technology, but also deeply understand education, especially all aspects of public education management and teaching, as well as the actual needs of schools. Only in this way can we create a product that can really help teachers reduce burdens and increase efficiency, improve management efficiency and teaching quality.
"This is not a simple technology company or Internet company that wants to succeed." Zhou Lin said.
Of course, some organizations have given relatively feasible solutions. Take Xiaoyang Group as an example. Most of its managers have served as principals, information center directors, teachers and educational administrators in public schools, and have a deep understanding of school teaching and overall operation. In order to respond to the needs of schools in different regions in time, Xiaoyang Group has also set up service teams distributed all over the country.
According to Bullet Finance, in the future, in addition to solving the above problems, smart education players also need to create an overall solution with completely integrated data.
Zhou Lin mentioned that many schools are facing serious information islands and data chimneys. Because the data is stored in various fragmented systems, a teacher needs to remember and manage multiple sets of user names and passwords, and the same final exam data needs the teacher to repeatedly operate in multiple systems.
Such problems obviously make it impossible for schools to truly analyze big data, form effective data portraits, and even retain valuable data assets for schools.
Therefore, an overall solution to comprehensively integrate data is the most needed and urgent for schools. "But the problem is that in order to integrate all the underlying data, we need to deeply understand the actual needs of public education management and teaching, and we also need to try our best to overcome difficulties from the technical level." Zhou Lin said.
It can be said with certainty that in this new round of wisdom education melee, every player who enters the market cannot escape any of the above challenges, because the screening of partners in public schools is becoming more and more strict.
"Now many schools are not leading a person to make decisions. Before buying, they generally ask the organization to provide a trial for a period of time. During the trial, they will listen to the teacher's feedback and have a deep understanding of the product before making a purchase decision. " Zhou Lin said.
When the decision-making process of public schools becomes more cautious and the procurement standards become stricter, it will promote the continuous upgrading and iteration of the smart education industry. "Now many schools have gradually realized that the most vital thing is products and services, so in the final analysis, products have the final say." Zhou Lin added.
Undeniably, the joining of online education giant K 12 will inevitably raise the popularity of the smart education industry and attract more funds and resources, thus making the imagination of the whole industry bigger, but this does not mean that the players of smart education will be smooth sailing next.
Entering this smart education market with a scale of nearly 400 billion yuan is not an easy game, but no matter what "killer" is used, whether it is a new entrant or an old player, it is the "hard truth" to finally solve the actual needs of management and teaching for the school.
* The title of this article comes from: Picture Network, based on VRF protocol.