How to retain traffic in online education

(On February 10th, Xue Lihua, a mathematics teacher at Rong'an County No. 2 Middle School in Liuzhou, Guangxi, provided distance tutoring for students in Class 1 of Senior Three. Photo/IC)

How to retain traffic in online education

Our reporter/Xu Tian

Published in the 941st issue of "China News Weekly" on March 30, 2020

Turn on the front cameras of computers and mobile phones, and synchronize PPT and small videos to the students on the other end of the network. During the epidemic, countless teachers caught off guard and started live webcasting classes.

The Internet is intermittent, the communication effect in class is not good, students can't concentrate, and it is difficult to correct homework. Difficulties that have not been encountered in offline teaching in the past are frequently encountered at this time. Teachers are complaining and looking forward to the start of school. Online education companies, which have been immersed in the industry for a long time, quickly resorted to Internet-based teaching plans and interactive tools, and used free and low-cost live lessons to try to retain the large-scale traffic that is running around.

At present, some provinces have announced the start time of spring school. Soon, students will return to offline classrooms and even offline education and training institutions. After the vigorous traffic tide, how many people can be retained in the field of online education? What changes have been made in the industry due to the epidemic?

Is setting up a camera an online class?

Not long after the announcement of the postponement of the start of school was issued, Liu Yan, a junior high school teacher in Chaoyang District, Beijing, and her colleagues began to prepare various resources, including lesson preparation explanations, learning task lists, and evaluation exercises. According to the requirements of Beijing, after the postponement of the school year, schools can answer questions online. Therefore, the school's course content arrangement is also based on review and special learning, and no new lessons are taught.

There are generally two ways to start online teaching in a hurry. One is to use software to broadcast live, which is convenient for teachers and students to communicate in real time. to communicate. It sounds like there is not much difference from daily teaching, but the problem still arises.

Liu Yan teaches Chinese. Her classes often have exchange and discussion sessions, where teachers and students collide with each other and learn from each other. When it comes to online, the delay and lag of the network make this kind of interaction effect greatly reduced.

Similar problems have appeared in science courses that seem to be more suitable for online courses. A third-year mathematics teacher at the No. 1 Middle School in Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province told China News Weekly that the grades adopted a unified teaching method. As far as mathematics is concerned, the review progress of each class may have been different before, but in the online class stage, the whole grade is unified. After the schedule is established, the teacher will give lectures in a unified manner.

The teaching method is also live broadcast, and the teacher will share the pre-made PPT and explain. In the past, PPT was also used in offline teaching, but in mathematics class, this is only auxiliary. The most common thing teachers use is to reason and calculate equations on the blackboard, behind which is the complete presentation of thinking logic. PPT hastily modified, of course, cannot match the flexibility and detail of blackboard writing. The teachers are not without regrets, such lectures are a bit rough.

What makes them even more uncertain is the learning status of the students and the learning effect it brings. In the classroom, dozens of students are sitting, whoever is distracted or deserted, the teacher will be able to see them at a glance, and can quickly bring the other party back to his senses. It’s different across a screen. Even if the students are online, they can’t know the status of all the students, whether someone is secretly playing the game, and how the final learning effect is.

A teacher who has been engaged in civil service examination training for a long time told China News Weekly that when teaching offline, she only simulated the general level of most students during the lesson preparation stage. Say it several times. Other difficult knowledge points that are missing will be temporarily adjusted and explained through the eye feedback of the students present. Through the screen, these feedbacks cannot be obtained, so she can only break apart and crumble all the knowledge points that everyone may not understand according to her past teaching experience. The time cost of preparing lessons is several times that of the past, and it is hard to say what the final effect will be.

The camera is set up, and the teachers and students sit at both ends of the network. The same lesson plans and the same speaking skills are far from the effect of offline face-to-face teaching. This is obviously not what should be in the title of the online class. In fact, this is also one of the key contents explored by companies that have already set foot in the field of online education.

Similar to offline ordinary class teaching, most of the students who choose online education courses are in large classes with a large number of people. The scale is several times the size of the offline class, with thousands of people. This is also the most criticized point of large classes. The more students there are, the less differentiated and targeted teaching content will be. Can the needs of students be met?

A lecturer who has previously engaged in offline teaching and is currently teaching mathematics in large classes at a well-known online education company told China News Weekly that several leading companies in the industry usually stratify students when enrolling in large classes. This stratification involves differences in the materials students learn, as well as students' internal achievement. Different students enter different classes, and the content and difficulty of the syllabus will be different. To some extent, the teaching has a certain degree of pertinence.

In teaching, one of the indicators for evaluating the teaching effect is how long it takes to quickly complete a round of interaction, and whether the teacher can grasp the real situation of the students. As mentioned above, during the epidemic, teachers who were forced to switch from offline to online all said that due to the limitations of Internet speed and technical means, the interaction with students was weakened and the teaching effect was not good.

According to the above-mentioned lecturer, after explaining a difficult point of knowledge, they will ask students to do classroom exercises. The students' answers are fed back to the teacher through the system to quickly analyze the correct rate. The correct rate is high, the teacher will continue to teach and consolidate the same knowledge points through the next exercises; if the correct rate is low, the teacher will explain the relevant knowledge points again. If the analysis software is well developed, the teacher can also see the reason why the students make mistakes in answering the questions, such as carelessly pointing the wrong decimal point, or failing to understand the difficulty, so the teacher can prescribe the right medicine. The above-mentioned lecturer believes that on this issue, the large class has an absolute advantage because of its number.

It is not difficult to see that the degree of development of the teaching system is very important. The better the human-computer interaction is, the less interaction restrictions it brings.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has become a hot word in the field of online education, and the logic behind it is also the personalized learning realized by human-computer interaction, especially science courses. Dai Huan, CEO of Maisi Planet, who is engaged in product research and development of this concept, told China News Weekly that when a discipline is more structured and the teaching plan can be presented clearly and objectively, the human-computer interaction of such disciplines can be done better. Meticulous, better user experience.

Retain traffic

In early February, the top three online schools in the K12 field (abbreviation for preschool education to high school education), Xueersi, Yuanfudao, and Homework Gang started free live classes all day, and then announced that the number of applicants for live classes exceeded 10 million. According to industry insiders' predictions, in the end, the number of live-streaming class registrations of these companies should exceed 20 million each.

A set of data that can be compared is that, according to media reports, in the summer of 2019, after the K12 field experienced a fierce advertising campaign with a total of billions of dollars, among the Big Three, more than one online school enrolled more than one million summer students.

Although one is a free course and the other is a paid course, the data are not comparable. But it is undeniable that many users who have never used online education courses are being reached for the first time.

According to a set of statistics from Tencent, the penetration rate of K12 online education target groups rose from 37.5% to 56.7% during the epidemic, a year-on-year increase of half, and 20% of potential users with high intentions were activated. 53% of parents said that during the epidemic, they paid more attention to and understood online education, and 33% of parents personally tried online classes. During the whole experience, users' perception of online education was redefined.

In the words of industry insiders, this is a blow that penetrates dimensions. Offline education and training institutions rely on word of mouth, and parents usually choose offline education and training institutions that are close to home and have a good reputation. But there are also more fourth- and fifth-tier cities, due to the lack of high-quality teacher resources, there are no high-quality offline education and training institutions. Traffickers with nowhere to go poured into the free live classes provided by various companies, and felt the leap of the geographical dimension for the first time-teachers in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai could teach them.

The lecturer of the mathematics subject of the above-mentioned educational institution told China News Weekly that during the epidemic, she met many users from the southwest region, and the opportunity of free live broadcast classes allowed them to come into contact with courses that they had never had the opportunity to contact in the past.

Under the tide of traffic, the all-day live broadcast class temporarily caught them and gave them somewhere to go. Next, how to convert them, that is, to make them willing to buy paid courses in addition to free courses, and what's more, to become long-term users of the company is a big test for all companies.

Companies already have a mature funnel model. Live classes attract traffic, and then use a model similar to 49 yuan low-priced classes and services that tend to be regular-priced classes to import a group of users who are willing to pay from the free traffic. In the end, there will be a group of customers who are guided by their own needs and consumption. , purchase regular-priced long-term courses, and even become long-term users because of the company's product and service quality.

To retain traffic and screen out target customers, you need to understand two core issues: where do you come from and where do you want to go.

"Where are you from" is the user portrait, their city, consumption level, educational philosophy, etc. After a month, the user portraits of the vast majority of traffic have become very clear, and there is a consensus in the industry that they are users in the sinking market in third-, fourth-, and fifth-tier cities—this is a user group that companies in the K12 field used to be difficult to reach.

"Where do you want to go" is the needs of users, what price and quality of service they need. With this information in hand, companies can tailor products to match their needs.

Beita Capital, which focuses on venture capital investment in the education field, also issued a post in the epidemic that they believe there is a problem matching the supply of the sinking market. They had in-depth communication with many famous grassroots teachers on the Kuaishou platform, and found that they were facing students with an average score of about 40 points. Such students are seriously neglected in the education and training institutions in first-tier cities, and they cannot conduct group teaching. They often have to provide one-on-one services, and the price is relatively high. The reality is that there are many students with similar grades in the sinking market who need inclusive educational resources. Li Yifei, the investment director of the institution, told China News Weekly that they believe that there will be companies that match this differentiated user group with low-priced and less difficult course products, which is where the new flow of online education will come.

An insider from a leading company also confirmed the above view. The other party told "China News Weekly" that more than half of the new traffic they counted came from third-tier cities and below. They move closer.

During the epidemic period, free courses abounded, and users were faced with a wealth of choices, which also prevented some companies from carrying out their original sales actions, and their performance declined sharply in the short term. In addition, there are also comments and analysis in the industry that the massive distribution of these free online courses has caused offline users to lack a smooth transition from "the Internet should be free" to "the Internet should also be paid". is not optimistic.

Even for companies that offer free courses, the cost pressure cannot be underestimated. Blackboard Insights, who is engaged in data analysis and research in the education industry, pointed out that considering teachers, venues, setting up servers, post-processing, post-maintenance, etc., the cost of free lessons is far beyond people’s imagination. From the perspective of bandwidth, it is calculated on the basis of 30 frames , using a mobile phone with a mainstream configuration to watch an hour of online class requires more than 2G traffic. Assuming this rate of viewing, and each student takes one class a week, if 12,800 students watch it every week, the education company needs to invest about 400,000 yuan in bandwidth cost. In fact, a child has far more than one hour of class per week. "For online education companies, who really knows who is suffering."

Without strong financial support, free course offerings may be unsustainable. Therefore, more than one interviewee pointed out that under the big waves, the advantages of leading companies will be more obvious, and industry resources will be more concentrated. It remains to be seen how much of the new traffic brought about by reaching the sinking market will eventually be retained, and how much change will be brought to the direction of the online education industry after staying.