The E-learning Miracle

Gong Haiyan sees all these problems as opportunities for online learning and the incubation of a huge market. Tizi.com is a bid to create an e-learning community that helps students develop individually. Intensified practice of the intelligent assessment system helps students pinpoint their weak points. Parents can follow their children’s learning process either through smart phones or computers. The website also features an intelligent filtering system that blocks access to inappropriate content. This reassures parents of their children’s protection when using the Internet.

Tizi.com has reportedly signed contracts with excellent teachers at primary and secondary schools around China. They contribute curricula and examination preparation materials that are available to all registered users. Teachers throughout the country can refer online to the 10 million courseware and papers as their daily work demands.

Tizi.com is a boon for students in remote areas, offering them free assessments of their learning level and the opportunity to take part in online Q&A sessions. The website also enables students from less developed and rural areas or who are not at top-tier schools to share quality teaching resources.

Zhang Jie (center), president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, launches www.cnmooc.org, an online learning platform for courses in China.

Establish a New Profit Model

The 2013-2014 China E-learning Development Report, released by iResearch, shows that the market scale of online learning in China in 2013 was RMB 83.97 billion – 19.9 percent higher than the previous year. The figure is predicted to surpass RMB 160 billion in 2015, implying massive development of China’s online learning market in the years ahead.

Michael Gao, director of BD & Research at Nielsen Online, a service branch of global market research firm the Nielsen Company, recently remarked that 200 million people participate in online learning in China. The year 2013 saw 51 corporate investment projects in the sector, including 44 of venture capital, with a US $82.4 million value of disclosed transactions. Such extensive coverage of individuals and large-scale venture investment inevitably leads to educational reform.

Generally speaking, e-learning maintains a sound cash flow because terminal consumers purchase educational products directly online. Profits come mainly from charges for content, added-value service, software instant service fees or monthly service fees, commission, and advertising.

Xue.taobao.com earns its profits from the big data collected online from its businesses and individual entrepreneurs, and from service fees. Depending on the existing online resources, Taobao creates new values in improved service. For instance, when New Oriental offers a program, it is concerned with little more than teaching content. But Taobao can easily accommodate experience sharing, communication and evaluation of curricula on its platform. In the past two years, Taobao has come to the realization that the traditional sale and purchase model no longer satisfies the demands of either entrepreneurs or consumers. The newly built platform instead fuses product, learning process and off-class evaluation, in hopes of forming a self-organization via contact between teachers and students, students and students, and teachers and teachers. SNS, namely social networking services, will thus propel its own development, closely and jointly combining the two sides.