Monday, 2024 December 23

Online Education in China: A Year of Fire and Ice | Morning Briefing Ep 1

Morning Briefing by KrASIA kicked off on February 16, 2021! This new fortnightly series gives a breakdown on China’s industries, exclusive to our subscribers. Click here to gain access and see what topics we’ll be covering next.

Starting with China’s K-12 Online Education sector, the 20-minute session delved into industry big-picture observations, concerns surrounding the online model and how companies are responding to challenges, as well as notable investment trends and a case study on one of the leading ed-tech unicorns.

Encompassing nearly 178 million Chinese students, the K-12 education sector is undeniably a highly competitive landscape. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digitalisation of K-12 education, driving exponential growth in the students user rate of online education services — leaping from 13% – 15% in 2019, to 23% – 25% in 2020. Despite such positive results, the industry is being pulled in two opposite directions, giving rise to a ‘fire and ice’ dynamic.

Morning Briefing expounded on the ‘fire’ factors that heat up the market, and the ‘ice’ factors’ which are inherent deficiencies and obstacles that cool it down. 

 

To give more context to understanding the current online education landscape, Morning Briefing discussed the problems the offline-to-online (O2O) models are attempting to solve, including customer acquisition and renewal, scaling of the business and improving the efficacy of students learning. On the flipside, the debate questioning the sustainability of the O2O model was also highlighted, uncovering critiques of current online education models.

The online-merge-offline (OMO) model was then introduced as the upcoming trend, and a response from ed-tech companies to on-going concerns.

Lastly, the Morning Briefing team touched on the implications of the 2020 investment craze before introducing ed-tech unicorn Yuanfudao as a case study. During the webinar, Morning Briefing also provided a demo of how its online question bank Yuantiku works as an interactive resource for students.

Morning Briefing will be back on March 2nd, 9am (GMT+8) to uncover China’s Enterprise Services! Register here to access this closed-door session and learn more about what topics the team will talk about in upcoming episodes.

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