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With technology and traffic in hand, Internet giants have the inherent advantages of entering education. With their unique trump cards, how can Ali, Byte, Huawei, NetEase, and Tencent play in the education industry?
1. Taobao education e-commerce platform builds a bridge between education and training institutions and consumers
In June 2020, Taobao Education released the “100 Million Freshman Program”, which will help more than 1,000 educational training and knowledge-paying institutions acquire more than 100,000 new students in the next three years. “Now 9 months have passed, and the first year goal has been completed ahead of schedule. At the same time, the average number of merchants entering Taobao Education every month in the past year has reached 1,300, which is 30% more than the initial stage of the epidemic. The supply and demand for knowledge are being matched on the platform at a high speed.” Taobao Education Operations Director Ye Ting shared.
Taobao didn’t get involved in education only last year. As early as 2013, Taobao launched Taobao classmates, teaching and training institutions can live teaching on Taobao classmates platform. In 2015, Taobao classmates changed its name to Taobao Education. However, even though Taobao Education relied on the country’s largest e-commerce platform at that time, it did not make any big moves.
Until March 2020, the epidemic forced the online transformation and upgrading of education and training institutions. Taobao Education Department was formally established, and Taobao began to make great efforts in online education. In addition to the epidemic, why did Taobao Education reorganize its organizational structure and start strong operations, and how can it achieve brilliant results within a year?
Relying on Taobao Tmall’s over 900 million monthly active users, Taobao Education has a natural traffic advantage. Moreover, users are not unfamiliar with purchasing educational products on Taobao. Taobao has a large number of educational physical products. Behind the purchase of review materials for postgraduate entrance examinations is actually the needs of users for postgraduate entrance examinations. Therefore, Taobao Education does not start from zero, but only needs to “completely integrate the previous consumer label and learning label, so that the two groups become one group.” It may also be one of the reasons why Taobao has quickly entered the education field by opening up physical and virtual consumer groups.
Huang Lei, general manager of Taobao Education Department, defines Taobao Education as follows: “Knowledge is a very immersive and continuous learning, which can better enhance the stickiness of Taobao users (consumers) on Taobao; knowledge categories can Increase user activity.”
If it is said that its own traffic foundation and education scene are the confidence of Taobao’s entry into education, then Taobao Education’s comprehensive service platform for education and training institutions and consumers is a catalyst for fruitful results in the past year.
From operations, live broadcasting to marketing, Taobao Education empowers educational institutions with several e-commerce unique tricks. In terms of course release, Taobao Education has launched a light classroom mini program. Education and training institutions or knowledge-paying businesses can publish courses and pay for knowledge in the background through the mini program. Taking advantage of the content advantages of the courses, live broadcasts and short videos are also used by educational institutions to bring goods. One hour before the double eleven pre-sale last year, 44% of people bought online courses from Taobao live broadcast rooms, and famous teachers took courses became a trend.
In response to the possible funding problems of small and medium-sized institutions, Taobao also provides financial solutions: “Merchants can apply for SME revolving loans provided by online commercial banks to reduce the difficulty of loans and solve the cash flow problems of institutions.”
“Taobao Education has a dedicated service business group. If any business has a problem in the group, you can get feedback and solve it immediately, which is very convenient.” said Xu Zulu, founder of Jiuming English.
On the consumer side, Taobao Education also made a lot of effort. In order to provide consumers with more secure services and fully meet the needs of consumers, Taobao Education launched an initiative to learn with confidence on the first anniversary of the Customer complaints, order ratios, refund intervention rates, etc. are all included in the evaluation system, and data indicators are used to force organizations to improve service capabilities and after-sales capabilities. It provides multiple guarantees from the four dimensions of course quality, logistics service, payment service, and after-sales service, so that consumers can feel at ease to experience high-quality courses, and in a true sense “choose and learn with confidence”.
2. Dingding Education’s new infrastructure helps inclusive education
In 2020, Dingding will change slogan to “make work and study easier”, which is evident in its determination to accelerate the layout of education. The data also shows that DingTalk’s efforts over the past year have achieved remarkable results. On January 14, 2021, at the DingTalk 6.0 release conference, DingTalk officially announced that DingTalk has served more than 210,000 schools, 7 million teachers and 140 million student users.
Dingding did not only start catching up with the high-speed train of online education during the epidemic. As early as March 2019, DingTalk released its exclusive version “DingTalk Future Campus” for schools. The purpose is to help schools achieve a comprehensive digital transformation through five aspects: organizational online, communication online, collaborative online, business online, and ecological online. Create the school’s own digital operation and management platform.
Chen Hang, CEO of Alibaba Dingding, once said that Dingding was originally developed for SMEs to work online, but noticed that many users in the education field also have corresponding needs, so they also launched corresponding products. But this is by no means the only reason for Dingding into education.
In June 2016, the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan for Education Informatization” mentioned that the phenomenon of “two skins” between informatization and education and teaching still exists, and the application motivation of teachers, students and education administrators needs to be further stimulated. It is common for many schools to ignore the safety of construction, the hardware to ignore the software, and the data collection to ignore the data maintenance.
In April 2018, the Ministry of Education issued the “Education Informatization 2.0 Action Plan”. National documents show that while educational informatization has become the general trend, there are still many problems. Therefore, relying on Alibaba Cloud’s underlying capabilities and technical support, DingTalk has proposed its own solutions for education informatization.
Entering the door of online education a year earlier than the epidemic, Dingding has more buffer time to fine-tune the layout of new education infrastructure. Aiming at the entire process of education, DingTalk has launched a complete digital solution. With the help of digital technology, DingTalk has helped to achieve inclusive education in all aspects.
For education authorities, DingTalk launches the bureau’s school home management service platform. The district and county education bureaus can use the digital cockpit function to understand the operation of all schools in the region. Teachers’ version of DingTalk is launched for teachers, and the most commonly used by teachers More than a dozen functions are grouped together on the “Teacher’s Workbench” to gather the teacher’s daily work. Teachers can publish homework, take classes online, count class information or issue notices with just one button operation on the workbench, completing most of the teaching, teaching and research work in one stop.
In response to the repetitive tasks of teachers’ daily correction of homework, DingTalk has also released an AI-modified homework product to reduce the burden of teachers’ repeated correction of homework; in order to solve the problem of sharing accounts between parents and children, Dingding has launched a “student number”, which students use. The account login DingTalk will enter a pure version of the operation interface, and parents can choose to turn on and off some functions of the student account.
In addition, DingTalk and Alipay jointly launched the education version of the “Spring Thunder Plan”, which will fund 5,000 schools, 1,000 education and training institutions and 100 education bureaus across the country for digital construction.
In the process of Dingding’s education, it has always been adhering to the concept of promoting inclusive education through digital technology. With the help of digital technology, Dingding not only sinks high-quality curriculum resources into the city, but also helps public schools and teaching and training institutions to improve the level of digital management and promote the reform of teaching models. Committed to becoming a digital and intelligent education service platform in China, DingTalk will also go further in the layout of digital inclusive education.
3. Tencent multi-dimensional efforts to build a smart education system
In May 2019, Tencent launched the education brand “Tencent Education” for the field of smart education, focusing on the to B market and positioning it as a “digital assistant” for the upgrading of the education industry. Tang Daosheng, senior executive vice president of Tencent, said that Tencent Education will provide connections, management, systems and other capabilities for individuals, schools, teachers, and education departments, and use unified connections and interfaces to serve as a smart upgrade assistant for the education industry.
During the 2020 epidemic, Tencent, which is committed to becoming the “most respected Internet company”, actively participated in the construction of smart education, and promoted the fairness, personalization and wisdom of online education through technology. In 2020, as a technical supporter and cloud resource provider, Tencent Education has created a cloud service, teaching platform, information management, teaching AI, and interactive classroom SaaS for the diverse and individual needs of different regions and different groups of people. A series of solutions for schools, teachers, students and parents to choose freely. In the whole year of 2020, Tencent Education helped 3 million+ teachers start classes, served 1,000+ education departments, landed more than 100,000 smart campuses, and guaranteed 100 million+ teachers and students online learning.
Looking back further, Tencent has been investing in the education industry since 2014. The investment track includes K12, vocational education, quality education, language training and early childhood education, etc., and most of the education and training institutions invested by Tencent are in various competitions. Dao’s head brands, such as Ape Guidance and New Oriental Online for online K12 training, VIPkid for online one-to-one, early childhood education for babies to play English, and 100 words for English learning.
In addition, Tencent also has its own education business, involving subdivisions including the child English enlightenment product Tencent Happy Mouse English, K12’s penguin tutoring and English master, higher education new engineering and online education platform Tencent Classroom.
Tang Daosheng, senior executive vice president of Tencent, once said that the integrated education brand Tencent Education “will use connectivity, content, and social responsibility to help the education industry.” Based on cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, Tencent Education today will still be committed to promoting education informatization and education intelligence.
Four, byte vigorously works miracles
On October 29, 2020, ByteDance announced the launch of a new education brand “Strong Education”, which will undertake all educational products and businesses of ByteDance. In February 2021, Dali Education announced that it will recruit 10,000 people in the next four months. This recruitment covers multiple positions in teaching, research and teaching, R&D, operation, product, and design. After this round of recruitment, the number of employees of Dali Education will be There will be more than 20,000 people. The education field is becoming one of byte’s strategic focus.
In terms of layout education, BYTE has full strategic determination. In 2019, Chen Lin, the former CEO of Toutiao, began to take charge of the education department of ByteDance and announced “All in Education”. In March 2020, the founder Zhang Yiming specifically mentioned in the internal letter of the eighth anniversary of the establishment of ByteDance that the education business will be his key business direction, and proposed that “the education business must have fundamental innovation.”
On March 20, 2021, on the ninth anniversary of the establishment of Bytedance, Zhang Yiming put forward in his internal letter that “do not rely on shortcuts, use less leverage”, emphasizing that product creation requires broad imagination and constant patience, and should not be overly dependent. Methodology. Byte’s ambition is even embodied in the name of the education brand-Vigorous Education is named after Zhang Yiming’s belief in “Strive for Miracles”.
The traditional view is that education is a slow industry. Only by constantly improving the quality of courses and putting effort into teaching and research can we build a high-quality brand. ByteDance is patient enough to do education. Dali Education CEO Chen Lin once said: “Education business will not be considered profitable within three years.”
In addition to determination and patience, BYTE also has a fundamental advantage in education-the power of organizational culture. Chen Lin believes that “Byte pursues high talent density, internal information flow, and context not control; encourages different functional lines to collide, cross-border, and collaborate to generate innovation on a larger scale; adhere to user orientation. These are ByteDance’s unique pragmatic romanticism is also the underlying support for the rapid development of many of our businesses.”
Holding the trump card, Byte accelerates its pace in the education field. At the press conference of the Vigorous Education brand, Chen Lin said that not only after-school tutoring, but also school education and family education are very important. Inside the school, outside the school, and at home, BYTE’s layout in the education field is fully expanded from these three directions.
For school education, Byte has invested in Big Data, AI, Xiaoyang Education, and Minerva, an innovative university; for family education, ByteDance focuses on smart education hardware, and expects to use hardware products to complete the online line of learning scenarios Link. The first smart education hardware product “Dali Smart Homework Lamp” was released on the same day as the Dali Education brand. This product combines smart tutoring with desk lamps and is mainly used in children’s homework scenarios. For out-of-school tutoring, GOGOKID and Guagualong have been launched. , Qingbei Online School, Kaiyan English and other products, the business covers Pre-K, K12, adult education and many age groups.
5. Huawei Technology Empowers Education
In April 2020, the Huawei Education Center was launched with Huawei MatePad, gathering a number of head education applications and many educational resources. Based on technical advantages and multi-scenarios and multi-terminal traffic entrances, Huawei Education Center is committed to forming a model of cooperation across the industry chain from content resource aggregation, content productization, and content distribution, and gradually builds an open education content ecology. Education industry partners work together to provide Huawei end users with a better educational service experience.
Huawei’s education layout is characterized by the simultaneous development of education cloud construction and consumer business, with a selling mindset. Huawei Education Center will help developers build product-dimensional marketing and activity capabilities through openness + support, and maximize developer value. Comprehensively help users plant grass before, during and after learning, help educational partners to efficiently distribute high-quality content to target users, and jointly build a closed-loop education business ecosystem.
In order to deeply empower cooperative brands and build a more complete education content ecology, starting from September 29, 2020, Huawei Education Center will launch an exclusive incentive program for partners-the Sparkle Star Program, through technology access incentives and the number of courses. There are two ways to provide Huawei App Market Yaoxing Traffic Voucher and Huawei Education Center exclusive traffic to partners who meet the incentive conditions.
Since its release on September 29, 2020, Yaoxing Spark Program has supported cooperative brands in multiple dimensions through exclusive incentives, and has attracted 33 educational partners such as Nano Box, BabyBus Nursery Rhymes, Onion Academy, Youdao Premium Classes, and Quasi-Question Bank. Participate and help partners achieve a certain incremental increase in efficiency.
In the future, Huawei Education Center will adhere to the cooperation concept of “openness” + “win-win”, integrate its own technological advantages, multi-scenario traffic entry, and diversified incentive resources, and work with education industry partners to bring better quality smart education to Huawei end users Experience.
Sixth, NetEase replenishes old education business
In December 2007, the desktop version of Youdao Dictionary was officially launched, and NetEase became one of the first Internet giants to enter education. After more than ten years of development, Netease can be seen on all major education tracks, including vocational education, general education, higher education, examination training (language, postgraduate entrance examination, study abroad), K12 education, etc., all have their layout , The corresponding products are NetEase Cloud Class, NetEase Open Course, China University MOOC, Youdao Premium Course and K12 field, Geek Zhan Ji, NetEase 100 points.
After 2016, Youdao launched a large number of education-related content and products, such as Youdao Mathematics, Youdao Spoken Language, and Youdao Translation Egg. Now four product matrices have been formed: learning products, learning services, smart devices, and content interactive courses. NetEase began to aggressively attack the established education business. In March 2019, NetEase announced that the original NetEase Education Business Division product system, such as NetEase Cloud Classroom, China University MOOC and other products, were all merged into NetEase Youdao’s product system. NetEase Youdao CEO Zhou Feng also said that afterwards, NetEase Youdao will focus on the K12 field, continue to invest in content, and attach importance to services.
Talking about why K12 has been the focus of its development in recent years, NetEase Youdao CEO Zhou Feng said, “The reason for focusing on K12 is that the demand is the most intense, the parents are the most caring, and the users are the most caring, so this is the most important thing to make a good product. Fields.” Ding Lei also mentioned in his listing speech, “In recent years, I have noticed that China’s K12 online education is a very suitable point for development.”
NetEase Youdao’s emphasis on K12 has also paid off. On November 19, 2020, NetEase Youdao announced its unaudited financial report for the third quarter of 2020. During the reporting period, NetEase Youdao achieved net income of 896 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 159.0%. Among them, K12 regular-price courses paid 498,700 people, a year-on-year increase of 437.9%; sales were 676 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 368.9%.
Education is a “slow field”, and the level of teaching and research, management capabilities, and talent reserves all need to be accumulated over a long period of time. It will take time to prove whether Internet giants rely on technology, capital, and traffic to build their advantages in the education field.
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