This article from theTencent Cloud Technology Salon, the theme of this salon isPractice of personalized teaching technology in online education
Speaker: wang | from VIPKID. Product leader of VIPKID Online Classroom Center. I have listened to a lot of technical sharing this afternoon. There is no technical content in my sharing, but my personal understanding of some industries or products. If you feel tired, you can relax and have a rest.
I’m going to focus on the product side today, and try to mix it up with some technical stuff. I have been in VIPKID for more than three years, and have been deeply involved in its operation from the earliest product construction to the present operation. In the process of sharing, I want to discuss the theme of technology and education to empower the future. However, this topic is too big for the teacher to give an effective speech in half an hour, so I refocused the topic to my typical characteristics and influencing factors in the education industry and made such an abstraction. Let’s take a look at what education is and how the industry as a whole has evolved. In this process, we try to abstract and summarize some experiences, and based on these experiences, we see if we can imagine the future of education.
What is education?
This topic touches me the most. Some time ago, WHEN I talked with a friend, he said, what do you do? I said, I do online education. He said, “Teaching, educating people, what is your educating part?” I have been reflecting on our whole education industry, or stay more in the knowledge, how to learn part. However, in fact, in terms of personal ability and social relations, they may not pay much attention to everyone’s affairs, but consider more from the perspective of commercial products.
What kind of service I provide to the user, what kind of knowledge he gets, what kind of business value I get. But for children or we for students comprehensive ability may not consider so much. From the perspective of Chinese and foreign, are very close to the understanding of both at home and abroad, based on this, this is today to share process of content source, based on the content part is to review the education industry, is part of teaching, teaching knowledge, and cultivate the students’ part, the two parts, respectively, to see what kind of education industry in the past, there may be what kind of opportunities in the future.
The evolution of content communication carriers
The change of content communication carrier. From the earliest oracle bones to bamboo slips, to printing. What is their historical value? The books I recently bought were electronic and paper, and the price difference was huge. Costs are getting cheaper and forms are becoming simpler and more readily available. So from that point of view, number one, the cost of content in my view is gradually going down. Second, the evolution of the past knowledge approach. “Shuo Wen Jie Zi” the first sentence, parents are to teach children, is the upper and lower effect, I teach children how to do.
The evolution of access to knowledge
I saw a documentary the other day about baboons, and baboons teach their offspring how to be the next leader. Therefore, the same is true of human beings. In the earliest stage, it was still parents’ teacher education, and with the later development, there were some changes in social class. Some of the top social classes, gradually access to some relatively high-quality resources, began to have some private teachers. In fact, it is now the very primitive prototype of 1-to-1, which can have more money, spend more resources and invite more advantageous educational resources.
In the future, most of them want to get top education resources at a high cost, an excellent teacher to teach one to one, teachers 24 hours to teach students are limited. And now school education, modern education can spread the cost evenly. From this point of view, the cost per person is getting lower and lower, but there is another problem with this process that it becomes less efficient. Because everyone may receive the information quickly, while some students receive it slowly, there will be differences in personnel efficiency.
What VIPKID does, in my opinion, is to make educational resources more efficient. The Internet is a very important change, the rapid replication of data content, as long as you want to learn, as long as the cost is very low, as long as you have a computer to understand the knowledge. So for this part of my understanding, I think it is the reduction of resource persistence.
Application of technology products in education industry
The combination of technology in the application of industry, what can it solve? In my opinion, it can change students’ learning efficiency at present. Here comes another topic, most of you are still born in the 1980s and 1990s, and their education process is still based on the knowledge of school teachers. There will be a big difference. For a family with first-line children in the city, they may have access to the most advanced technology in the industry, while for some children in the countryside, school is the only way for them to acquire knowledge. At this time, learning efficiency will have a great deviation, including the understanding of the content will also have a great deviation, this thing is very terrible. How we can use technology to improve schools and apply it to society. In my opinion, this is a question worth thinking about and discussing.
We talk about education equity, education equity at this stage is no longer to build a hope primary school, is no longer a basic hardware problem. It is more about the broadening of children’s horizons and the improvement of learning efficiency. This part determines the future of a child’s life. So going back through this process, I think the most important application of technology products in this industry is actually the improvement or improvement of learning efficiency.
The enlightenment of Finnish education
Based on the comprehensive quality of children, I extend to a topic called Finnish education. In recent years, Finnish education is more popular than American education. In the education rankings, Finnish education has surpassed that of the United States. In this process, I read several books, including talking to some other friends who are engaged in Finnish education. I can give you a typical Finnish characteristic.
First, Finnish schools do not wear uniforms, there is no standard school uniform. In China, school uniforms look good or not. They fit well and look good. Finland does not pay attention to the individuality of children, pay attention to the individual cognition of children, very emphasis on children’s self-nature, self-learning, their own cognition of themselves, their own cognition of the society.
Second, in the process of learning basic education, more emphasis is placed on learning survival skills and social skills, rather than learning too much knowledge.
After the end of world War II, Finland’s society was not good in economy and politics, but it has grown very fast in recent years. It is important to point out that the country’s investment in education resources accounts for a very high proportion, and many students’ first career aspiration is to be a teacher. Teachers have considerable control over their students and educational resources, and children have considerable control over the subjects they want to learn. Parents also respect the cognition of this matter. In this process, we come back to the original question, can education only teach knowledge? Besides knowledge, are there other skills that we need to focus on?
Learning about changing trends in relationships
So in this process, MY own conclusion is two parts of the social relationship. The first is a dialogue between the child and himself, and the other is a dialogue between the child and social relations.
Here is an example of the Wolf child, who is biologically human. But from the social relationship he has been a Wolf, he is difficult to integrate with human society. In this process, every isolated individual, including future children, needs to focus on this kind of social relationship. The whole technology industry has changed human life, many of which do not need to be done in the human link.
You go to book tickets, you don’t have to go to the window, a lot of jobs are going to be replaced, and we can imagine what the social structure is going to be for our kids 30 years from now, when they’re 30 years old, are they still doing basic things? What is the appeal of human beings at that time? What are the core values of human beings when most of the work, takeout and delivery are replaced by machines? That’s something to think about. So when you connect the dots, what is education for the next generation? So it’s worth thinking about.
Going back to a lot of technical stuff, technology is about servicing the services that we provide. We provide a lot of infrastructure, including the underlying audio and video communications, and I can make sure that across the sea, from the United States to Africa, the latency is down to how many milliseconds. But what we can offer on top of that infrastructure is probably the core value.
Therefore, this will involve a change of concept, from the earliest learning from parents, at this time the learning resources are relatively single, the learning content is relatively single. At this time, resources are involved, including one-on-one learning with teachers, which is relatively expensive. To the school, although part of the problem of resources and cost has been solved, but the head of the new problem resources become the target, so there is the school district house. Beijing is relatively better, we are still trying to compete, why? The problem of head resources, we still have to fight for the best resources, so the problem of resources has not been solved. Now these schools have done some innovation and change, gradually there will be rocket class, top class, young class, part of the school’s high efficiency of the students alone. But in essence, it has not solved the problem of everyone’s learning efficiency.
In addition, the social connection, everyone here, everyone’s social relationship will stay in the university classmates, colleagues, these two groups as the most important groups. This social connection, will there be a wider range of connections? There are two sides to this. One, what is the nature of social connection? If you can make this kind of social connection with your classmates at school, is it more likely? Let’s do a little bit of entrepreneurial understanding. Why do some people succeed in starting businesses? Because he has better resources, including investors’ resources, supply chain resources and channel resources. He does resource integration, so he has the possibility of success. Why does he have the ability to integrate resources? Going back to the previous question, what kind of skills do children need for the social situation they will face in the next three years? They’re making stronger social connections, they’re finding business opportunities, they’re innovating, they’re communicating effectively. They are more in the process of thinking, maybe basic things can be done by machines, or even products are all automated things to do. For example, some companies in the industry are listed, some technologies can be componentized, and some possibilities of rapid development and verification are still preliminary.
We think about the future possibilities of technology and education. First, science and technology education can bring stronger, more and better resource connections. Second, it can reduce the corresponding cost to a lower degree. There are its own customer acquisition cost, operating cost, content cost, resource cost, etc., there are many, you can spend lower cost, to obtain better resources. The other is the broader social connection, he’s not connecting with the people around him anymore, a lot of kids right now what are his kids? Friends in kindergarten, good friends in class, and nothing else. Our children’s social connections don’t stop there. That seems problematic to me, why is there a lot of activity in the United States? It is also about exposing them to more people and things and giving them more to think about.
Education Review summary
We’re talking about educational products, not education. Educational product is a service for students to solve a series of problems, such as educational resources, school knowledge level and social relations. First, an educational product is not a product, but a service. Second, it is divided into two parts, the first part is the knowledge part, the second part is soft skills. The knowledge part, nothing more than through resources, cost and efficiency to solve three aspects. The social relationship is divided into two parts: the relationship between oneself and oneself, and the relationship between oneself and society. Therefore, in this process, I want to think about whether only the education of the Internet can offer some potential opportunities. Not in my opinion. Think back to the present parents will not educate their children? Why many private schools, private primary schools will do the assessment of parents? Think parents have a great influence on their children, this is the parent level.
Opportunities to judge teaching resource acquisition
At present, quite a number of users still find one-on-one offline education and training, such as inviting a professor from the Piano Department of The Central Conservatory of Music to teach his children to learn piano. The mentoring relationship still exists. There are schools, public education, and many mating facilities, such as the basketball training camp in Beijing Sports University. Including Internet education, there are also some innovative models.
The most important impact of home education is in two parts. First, the family’s own educational concept and educational capital, what kind of educational capital it can provide for children, this capital includes money and goods. In my opinion, more emphasis is placed on the superior, elite and aristocrat, which are not equal concepts. It seems to me that there is very little aristocratic education in China. When we watch documentaries about aristocratic education in The UK, we have a very important idea that aristocratic education will not teach children how to write PPT, because someone will help them complete this skill. They need to learn how to do strategic thinking and resource integration, which is their education. So there’s a big difference.
The private tutor part. A private tutor is an interesting contrast to a school. Why would a teacher let a child sign up for a one-on-one piano lesson, but learn basketball with a class? Some parents sign up their children for one-on-one tennis lessons. My own understanding is as follows, the core is that parents have different sense of purpose and value for this matter. It does not agree with the value of learning piano and writing about playing basketball after learning piano for a period of time. You may think learning to play the piano is valuable. There are also small classes and large classes in piano lessons. Why is there a difference between one class and one class? There are three points: target, cost and efficiency. It’s how much money I have to spend, what goal I want to achieve, and whether I spend half a year just to get the grade, or to what extent. There are cultural, artistic and sports opportunities, but in my opinion, the core values behind the opportunities are different. Parents, the consumer group, have different judgments about this market, so there will be different opportunities.
The last point is the Internet, which can cover the whole country. From the point of view of society, there will be several aspects of coexistence in the long term, but there will be some differences in the judgment of opportunity points at this time, which opportunity points can be made big, which point is not big? Everyone is doing one-to-one, but which one-to-one can be big. Why can English do a very large market cap scale? For example, the scale of Weiqi and calligraphy is not particularly large, which may be due to the sense of value of the whole social group to these things. I am not saying that there is no value, but for the majority of the group, it is not necessary to spend so much time on calligraphy and Weiqi.
So another topic in this process is the integration of educational technology. Maybe it’s just a simple abstraction, so let’s list it. It seems to me that there are three main stages in the integration of education and technology. The first stage is online channelization. Second, online education services. Third, we need to combine science and technology. New Oriental early to do online, more to do delivery, users through online access to the website, to learn about their courses, to sign up, to pay. However, all courses are still offline in nature, so in this process, I call it the core or channel. But channel it solves the problem of acquisition cost. However, there will be a second problem, which is the online teaching courses. The teaching process solves the problem of space, time, cost, you go to rent a classroom, perennial expenses, fixed rent, maintenance of personnel and so on, it is very expensive. But with online classrooms, the cost can be very low. But there are some other problems, the first is resources, the second is efficiency, and the third is cost.
The core influence is two, the market size is the first influence. How big is your field that needs to go online? Because there’s another problem with that, you have to promote it first. If the market size is small, even if it goes online, there will be problems. And anxiety and resources are not so good, even if it goes online, judging by recent business revenues, the results are not particularly good. From the point of view of the Internet, let’s call it internetization, it cuts the right track. It is based on the test outline, all the content of the test outline is deconstructed into the corresponding test outline knowledge point, each knowledge point has exercises training. If this knowledge point has a problem, then this knowledge point down all problems will not. I’ll do it over and over again, and then I’ll move on. This is a very clever case, but it applies to the field is a very standardized scene, English teaching will encounter a very headache problem, in the whole world of English industry, there is no standard dare to say, my industry is the authority, is the only, is the most NB, no. All language systems face similar problems. Therefore, I will encounter a painful point in construction, such as how to build my knowledge graph, how to build an evaluation system based on my knowledge graph, and how to make the corresponding recommendation engine.
So in this category, the biggest core impact in my opinion is your build cost. As long as you have enough resources, you can do this. I will integrate the best educational institutions and educational resources together. I will integrate all my technical things, but the cost is very high. Facebook spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make education more scientific, but the end result was to cut off the team and form a company. Why? Because it’s a liability. Because it’s commercial, unless the government does it. This is very difficult for companies. In my opinion, the construction cost is the core influence, and this cost corresponds to the market size. If the market is big enough, your costs might go down, because it’s evenly spread. If the market is small and you have a lot of money to build, it’s very expensive. The user’s own value identity is not so high, the cost is so high, the problem is that you build a platform that everyone can’t afford. So the technology part, in my opinion, cost is a big headache.
From this point of view, why was VIPKID successful when I looked back? Just like the cost, efficiency and quality, there are corresponding foothold, so VIPKID will have the possibility of success. But with the evolution of the market and the entry of more and more competitors, many advantages will be reduced or no longer advantages. For example, the famous teachers in the English training industry before, when the famous teachers up, the famous teachers are no longer resources. Then there are foreign teachers, who used to be global foreign teachers, and now maybe north American foreign teachers. Therefore, the requirement for enterprises is to continue to explore what potential possibilities there are in these resources, in addition to foreign teachers, there are no more resources to do. Can technology complement this process? Including schools, whether science and technology can make changes to schools, whether science and technology can keep the cost down, whether more products and services in quality education can make children happier and realize its social value.
We make an engine, the purpose is to continuously expand more advantageous resources, to reduce our knowledge cost, improve the learning efficiency of children. There is no special extension of this part. What we want to do in this part is self-teaching and personalized recommendation.
So we’re going to focus on education, and this is going to continue to be a topic that we’re going to focus on. And I think all of you, after hearing this kind of stuff today, go back and think about it, the education industry is something that we need to change for generations. To change the concept of parents, grandparents, this process is the effort of several generations to change. This kind of change can change a situation, advantaged resource children, their class continues to be advantaged. Kids at the bottom, firmly at the bottom. The result is class solidification, and I firmly believe that life will be more equal in the future. It is not a single company that can change this. It requires the concerted efforts of the whole society and the whole global industry. Therefore, this point is what I want to share today. What can we do for education, what can we do for society, that’s what I want to say overall, thank you.
QA:
Q: In the current environment, such as Volcano, Tiktok. The problem is that our cognitive information is more fragmented. It was many years after I left school that I discovered that the mathematics I studied was not called mathematics, but arithmetic. I would like to ask you what you think about the problem of cognitive fragmentation?
A: Time fragmentation is definitely A trend. There are several problems in this process.
The first question is what we’ve learned in the past. For example, a lot of schools teach powerpoint, a lot of people teach strategic thinking. This is where the teaching content needs to change and break through, and it is not fragmentation that needs to be solved. What kind of content should we be teaching in the future, what kind of content is effective for the child, really helpful to him, what are his goals? Different people’s learning goals, learning abilities, learning time, and resources invested in it. It’s a comprehensive concept. This is the first piece.
And then there’s fragmentation, which is a good thing, but not necessarily a bad thing. But a lot of the things THAT I learned were short term, instantaneous. The benefits it brings are that children can access more and more comprehensive information, not only in school, but also in science, literature and other subjects. He can have more opportunities to learn more content. It’s a great place to have more social connections, more social connections between students. However, the learning process of some colleges and universities still needs to be time-controlled, and the problem caused by fragmentation is efficiency. Whether fragmentation can improve efficiency is a very serious challenge we face. But this fragmented thing, to be honest, I think is very typical of adult thinking, for children do not have this problem. A lot of kids watch movies, see this thing, see that thing, not necessarily he is in pieces. Many children watch Peppa Pig all the time, and he captures more information in this process than adults. We are now facing a very serious problem. Two days ago, we did a job to invite children and parents. When we observe the behavior of the parents and the behavior of the students, their ideas are totally different. Our generation’s knowledge of the world is based on the accumulation of our historical parents and grandparents. But they are their range plus our part. So their cognitive speed and learning speed is very fast.
The key point is not fragmentation per se, but whether the institutions engaged in educational services, or the practitioners, can inspire children based on their abilities and their future social status. So there’s a word in this, values and the first word is empowering children. How do we empower these kids, so that they have more space to imagine and develop, that’s what I think we need to do, not teach them, but empower them.
This goes back to academics, we’re not teaching 1+1 equals 2, we’re teaching what algorithmic logic is. So we’re going to have to rethink our education system and it’s going to take a big break. We’re an industrial product that’s been educated in a box. However, the era of standardized industrial products has passed, the development of the future society, for children, for us as parents, how to cultivate our children, is a great challenge. The same is true for me. The longer I understand education, the more I find myself ignorant. Education is really one that requires us to spend time and energy, to research, to think, to reflect, to explore new opportunities.
For more details, please click the following link: Wang Yung-ching: Technology Innovation Changes the Future of education. PDF
Question and answer
What are the recommended frameworks or solutions to build online education websites?
reading
Yang Ting: Tencent cloud online education solution sharing
Zhou Jinmin: Tencent online education video interactive direct broadcast room technology practice
Guo Zhuoxing: Examples of interactive classroom construction and application in related fields
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