Why are the share prices of online education companies plummeting? Why are many operational problems of online education companies exposed? Why is the regulatory hammer industry hammering so often?

In the past, quantitative indicators have been followed-- the amount of financing, the speed at which advertisements burn money, the value of low-cost courses as a funnel, the acquisition of scale users, the continuation rate, and whether the scale of revenue has entered the leading team.Judging the value of relevant companies actually falls into the context of the capital side, while ignoring the most basic first principle of the industry: the quality of education.

Online education does not do education seriously, just like Internet finance did not do finance seriously in the past decade. What about inclusive benefits? In the end, it all evolved into a capital game, which can be described as "education on both sides and sharp words in the middle".

When it comes to the degree of danger, Internet finance is far from comparable to online education. After all, the development potential of old leek is always less than that of the flowers of the motherland. If you understand this layer, you can understand why the top level criticizes the online education industry.

"going to a dead end" is a true portrayal of the online education industry, and it is also another interpretation of our previous "online education knockout"-if they don't look back.

01、Refresh the lower limit

In order to expand the scale of paying users, in order to increase the renewal rate, online education institutions really fight, let's enjoy the show.

Yuanfudao, homework gang, Gaotu Techedu Inc. classroom and Qingbei online school four online education institutions employ the same actor as a spokesman. In Gaotu Techedu Inc., she is an English teacher who has taught for 40 years; in Yuanfudao, she has been a math teacher all her life; at Qingbei net School, she is an expert. This teacher may have learned the art of being a shadow, and she directly caused a heated discussion on the Internet.

Another billboard reads: "you come, we will raise your children; if you do not come, we will train your children's competitors." "such remarks directly increase parents' anxiety, the principle is the cinema effect, when the audience in the first row stands up, the rest will be held up, whether they like it or not.

2020In 2008, the online education industry is the biggest tuyere, with a financing amount of 103.4 billion yuan, and the biggest use after financing is all kinds of advertising.

In order to attract users, all kinds of false information in this industry also emerge one after another.

In the advertisements of the organization, 20 years of teaching experience and Tsinghua / Peking University / Harvard are not uncommon, but these gorgeous backgrounds are only superficial work and are even acquiesced by educational institutions, as long as "don't go too far". There are more teachers who are "employed without a license".

• Learning and thinking was fined 2.5 million yuan for false propaganda that "localized teachers, more than 80% of teachers graduated from 985 Universitys Universiti."

• Among the 103 teachers in New Oriental Education & Technology Group's "famous teacher's elegant demeanor" column, the actual teaching age of 76 teachers is not in line with the propaganda, and most of them are false propaganda.
  

• According to the official propaganda of Dada English, "100% foreign teachers from native English-speaking countries, 1 to 1 European and American foreign teachers, and 100% European and American foreign teachers" is actually a fictional teacher qualification.
  

• Shenzhen Blue Sky Education and training School advertises its 121-member teaching and research team that "more than 85% of the teachers are from 985 and 211 universities". In fact, only 18 people graduated from 985211, accounting for less than 15%.
  

In the transaction link, some online educational institutions go to great lengths.

The cost of a course on an online education platform is less than 2600 yuan, and a parent is willing to buy it, but the deal is not done because of his low income. When the sales supervisor heard about this, they led parents step by step to conclude a deal from paying Baohua and loans from other platforms. The executive also told his members that "it's impossible for anyone not to come up with the money and let them borrow it if they can't."

In the renewal link, full of "routines" waiting to harvest parents.

Your grades didn't improve much after the course? Then you must tell parents that "learning cannot be done quickly". If not, add "the child has made progress." Then the score can be significantly improved, "if not, then take out the child's paper to continue the analysis."... Students still have a lot of room for improvement; if the above doesn't work, continue with the routine, "We happen to have cram lessons for children's weaknesses." "

In the acquisition of users to retain users on the means, but in education as a limited (the following sections will focus on), no wonder the online education industry has been focused on governance.

02、Is there any difference between tutoring students and herding sheep?

Why don't online education companies do education seriously? Because no one does it. The ratio of tutors to students is an important observation window.

According to the requirements of the Ministry of Education (there are other regulations in various places), there are 40 to 50 students in each class in primary schools and 45 to 50 students in secondary schools to ensure the quality of teaching. once the standard is exceeded, teachers will be tired to cope and it is difficult to pay attention to everyone.

Online education does not have the offline teaching scene of public schools, so the number of lecturers is out of proportion to the number of students, which is the characteristic of online education. But the number of tutors is also out of proportion to the number of students, and the student-teacher ratio is almost 10 times that of public schools, which is too much.

• TAL Education Group's number of full-time teachers in fiscal year 2021 was 44849, the number of applicants for long-term positive price courses was 18.68 million, and the teacher-student ratio was 417. This figure includes TAL Education Group's offline business, so TAL Education Group's online business teacher-to-student ratio is more than this figure.

• The number of financial reporting tutors in Gaotu Techedu Inc. class 2020 is 15291, the number of students paying for the full price class is 5.87 million, and the student-teacher ratio is 384.
  

• In fiscal year 2020, NetEase, Inc youdao had 3786 tutors, while 2.1 million paid for full-price classes, with a student-teacher ratio of 554.
  

In addition, the quality of tutors in online education companies is also a big problem.

Tutors are generally from recent college graduates, and the entry threshold is relatively loose. According to a recruitment website, the job requirements of a tutor are only: like the education industry, cheerful personality, recruit undergraduates.

To sum up: tutors don't need much experience, one person has to face hundreds of people. So what is the essential difference between tutoring students and herding sheep?

03、Do you want Sun Tzu's Art of War or 36 tricks?

The coverage of a single offline training institution is limited, and the situation of students in the classroom can be grasped in real time, which ensures that the effect of education is relatively controllable.

But even so, years of practice has proved that only the effect of "Peiyou" is significant. For example, the Mathematical Olympiad classes that learn and think, such as Haidian Huangzhuang (surrounded by famous schools such as the people's Congress attached to the North and Dafu and other famous schools), the surrounding training institutions that can absorb top students. In addition to the brand and special class type is guaranteed, the source of students is guaranteed special existence, the effect of other offline training is doubtful.

Looking back, the online education company, which is mainly based on the large class model, has thousands of students in a class, and there is no basis for "excellence", so the quality of its education is also in doubt.

A more obvious problem is that the number of students in online education is much faster than that in offline training.Take a look at the annual enrollment of paid users by major players: Gaotu Techedu Inc. classroom 5.87 million, NetEase, Inc youdao 2.1 million, education together 2.02 million.

With the rapid expansion of the scale of users, it will be more difficult to manage.: pre-class, in-class and after-class organization, how to mobilize students during live broadcast (after all, there are too many temptations of electronic equipment), whether the course content is suitable for most people, according to the localization measures in different regions, the effect evaluation after the end of the first period of training, measures to reduce the burden on students. The increase of the difficulty of management will further lead to the low effect of teaching, which can be said to magnify the problems of offline institutions at least 10 times.

Ironically, some online education companies also give students and parents unrealistic fantasies.For example, they claim that their training courses are effective and raise scores quickly, such as "memorizing 20,000 words in four days", "top kill" and so on.

Those so-called second kill techniques have almost no effect on the improvement of students' performance, and will only lead students astray. Just like you want to learn the art of war, the teacher does not teach you the "Tao Heaven and Earth General method" of Sun Tzu's Art of War, but teaches you the false masturbation skill of "36 tricks" that sounds very powerful. He is not teaching you, but destroying you.

04、Teachers' distorted KPI

As mentioned above, for those who do not have much experience, a pair of tutors for hundreds of students and parents are herding sheep. Maybe some people will take it seriously, saying that if the tutor is particularly responsible, then the teaching quality can be guaranteed.

We think that it is possible to ensure the quality of teaching if Naha, who has three heads and six arms, works as a tutor.Many tutors' KPI is not tutoring, but sales.

An online education company highly binds employees' salaries to renewal rates, withdrawal from classes and parents' satisfaction, and every day the tutor reports the phone calls, the length of calls, the number of calls, chat records and so on to the superior one by one. as a performance indicator ranking, and the implementation of the "last elimination system".

Under such an incentive mechanism, the behavior of tutors is bound to deform. Let's take a look at the tutor's related words:

If you give up a good learning opportunity for your child, please don't complain that your child is not good enough. Only by standing on the shoulders of giants can you see further. I would like to ask many parents, are you the giant? When the child is full of hope, do you give him a chance? The reality is very cruel. If your hands shake when you pay for your child's tuition, have you ever thought that his hands will shake when your child is going to pay for your medical expenses one day? Or very "filial piety" obedience to the idea that you do not want to see a doctor, just as you obey your children today. This is what happens every day, can be seen everywhere ~ do you want to let your regrets repeat in your children?

It's not over. Do you think selling KPI is only aimed at tutors, too young?The lecturer also has to do sales.

It has also become the "consensus" of many organizations to include the sales tasks of the lecturers in the assessment indicators. A teacher at an online educational institution once described it as follows:

Now even front-line teachers have the task of recruiting students.

Almost all online training institutions require front-line teachers to participate in enrollment.

As long as I can recruit more students for the institution, now I simply don't prepare lessons much. I just give lectures according to the script.

Under such an incentive mechanism, how effective can training be? The incentive mechanism is biased and education is not correct.

05、For the time being, don't expect giants like Tencent and Bytes to understand education.

Tencent Education mainly cut into K12 online education through "investment + internal incubation". The investment enterprises include Yuanfudao, homework gang, New Oriental Education & Technology Group online, Spark thinking and VIPKid, etc., as well as Tencent's own brand of penguin tutoring.

At the level of teacher assessment, Tencent's penguin tutoring is not much different from other teaching and training institutions. The teaching mode is mainly two-division live large class, the classroom content covers the general subject content from primary school to senior high school, and the class size is about 500-1000 students. In teacher assessment, tutors also undertake sales functions, KPI assessment and other indicators.

Byte jump acquired the Qingbei online school brand in October 2019. In terms of marketing channels, its Qingbei online school placed advertisements in Jinri Toutiao, Douyin, Volcano Mini Video and other channels, and there were a lot of questions:

For example, in January this year, the online education advertisement endorsement teacher "hit the face" on the hot search, Qingbei online School is one of the four institutions. And Qingbei online school classroom comment page, there is no lack of sales staff phone harassment, special classes can not be normal classes and other problems.

At the level of teacher assessment, it is reported that the sales role of tutors in Qingbei Internet School is prominent, telemarketing tasks account for 90% of the total workload, and teaching accounts for 10%. Teaching is only the groundwork for sales, and the assessment is strict. If the completion degree of the three renewal reports is less than 40%, you will be trained again.

Tencent's Penguin tutoring and Qingbei online School get more customers in their own system, which is slightly different from the current online educational institutions, but they are basically the same as the industry in terms of teaching methods and teacher assessment, and there is no obvious difference.

06、What are online education CEO paying attention to?

Who is the leadership of an online educational institution and what it pays attention to basically determines the style of an enterprise. In the past year, online education has experienced a moment of glory, and various online education CEO have appeared frequently. Through the speeches, internal letters and business outlook information in the financial statements of each CEO in the past year, it may be able to reflect the development logic of each company.

TAL Education Group CEO Zhang Bangxin, Chief Financial Officer Luo Rong-"customer achievement, technology empowerment": TAL Education Group has always regarded "customer-centered" as the company's core values, from the early "free audition, small class teaching, refund" model to the current offline excellent business. At the same time, it is emphasized that we should adhere to the simultaneous development of online and offline, and use technology to "serve a wider range of social groups with high-quality, low-cost courses and content."

Gaotu Techedu Inc. classroom CEO Chen Xiangdong, CFO Shen Nan-pay more attention to business and operation. In the past year, Gaotu Techedu Inc. classroom expressed more words in public, such as "focus on online large classes", "open up channels", "traffic", "competition", "operational efficiency and effectiveness" and other topics.

NetEase, Inc youdao CEO Zhou Feng-more emphasis on course quality and technology application: NetEase, Inc youdao is a product-driven company, the use of technology to create a good product is the foundation of NetEase, Inc youdao, the key words mentioned in the past year include "good lessons", "differentiation", "quality education", "intelligent learning" and so on.

Zhao Erdi, general manager of Tencent penguin tutoring-puts more emphasis on "technology + content". More emphasis is placed on the use of technology to innovate teaching content, establish a scientific and rich content system, and improve high-quality products and services.

Energetic Education (byte beat of its education brand) CEO Chen Lin-serves the education ecology and focuses on innovation. Chen Lin believes that education is a systematic project, which pays more attention to the growth of "people" and serves all participants in the educational ecology. In addition, Chen Lin mentioned that vigorous education will focus on educational innovation without considering profit in the next three years.

To sum up, Gaotu Techedu Inc. is a category that attaches more importance to Internet means, and the others are talking about technology, but there is little in-depth speech on the matter of education itself.

It is true that technology can change education, but this is only the result of a long period of evolution. After all, it takes a lot of time for technology to land, especially in specific complex areas. In the 1960s, we were talking about AI, and it was only in the past 60 years that AI commercialized in the fields of autopilot, biotechnology and so on.When the technical ability is insufficient, it is irresponsible not to take education as the core.

We think that before technology can comprehensively change education, we still need to go back to education itself. And only talk about technology, only pay attention to the expansion of Internet means, is a dead end. Remember, education is not indoctrination (whether with a teacher responsible for selling KPI or immature technology), it's about lighting the fire.