Due to the coronavirus outbreak in China during this winter vacation, the schools and colleges are closed. All the nationwide students rushed into an online classroom; industry penetration instantly increased by ten times.
Can online education companies provide high-quality service for students? How to maintain system stability under peak flow? How to deal with teamwork, organizational process, and educational administration? Under the limited workforce, how can technology play a more significant role? How tough is this big test?
Here are some data from different online education companies:
Hujiang English:
The daily life of users of Hujiang English and Hujiang ctalk platform is more than 10 times of that of years ago, and the number of online teachers and students has reached millions;
Homework group:
The number of free live class registrations exceeded 28 million on February 15, and on February 2, the number of free live class registrations increased by 1.5 million;
Ape tutoring:
On February 3, free live classes opened, setting an online education industry record of 5 million primary and secondary school students attending classes online on the same day in China. By February 6, the number of applicants for ape tutoring free live courses was more than 10 million.
Besides, online education enterprises such as leader 1-to-1 and VIPKid have all ushered in the “biggest flood peak” in history, and the average traffic growth of the whole industry is more than 10 times;
These questions for K12 online education enterprises, they become students, how to answer?
Key points:
Six knowledge points in the winter vacation of online education
Traffic test 10 times more than the daily peak: This is a severe challenge for any online education enterprise. First of all, it is the first thing for all online education enterprises to ensure sufficient teachers, teaching aids, and other teachers, as well as daily management, operation, and maintenance technicians. Taking ape tutoring as an example, to provide high-quality course content for primary and secondary school students, the free live ape tutoring class mobilized 356 lecturers, 412 teaching assistants, 151 technicians, and more relevant staff to continue “fighting.” But it’s not enough to have people in place.
The most significant difference from traditional offline education is “online,” which is to provide education services through the Internet, intelligent devices, and digital courses. Therefore, whether the online services can be guaranteed to run continuously and stably, without jam, low delay, no drop of line, and no downtime is crucial.
It is not suitable to use traditional Internet Data Center and technology.
There are three reasons: first, the whole process of equipment procurement, deployment and online is as long as 3-6 months, which can not match the sudden peak traffic;
Secondly, the peak traffic brought by the epidemic is just an unexpected event; if a large number of servers and bandwidth are purchased on hardware, there will be a waste of money after the peak.
Finally, to cope with the height of epidemic situation, distributed storage, distributed computing, video encoding, and decoding technology, video encryption, CDN distribution, and other technology stacks make it challenging to bear the human and time costs of development and operation.
Only the cloud can meet such a challenge. Take the experience of an online education enterprise during the epidemic period as an example: in less than a week, after three system expansion, the cloud resource consumption has nearly doubled, and the shortest time for expansion is less than 10 hours from resource inventory, demand distribution to development. The increase was completed at 5:00 a.m., and on that day, it experienced the challenge of millions of primary and secondary school students attending classes online.
- Individualized teaching plan and curriculum production:
Considering the personalization as the driving force, drawing each student’s learning plan and track, strengthening and weaknesses, and learning preferences automatically and intelligently, the online education companies need to help teachers design and develop more optimized learning strategies and learning programs for different students. Even based on the knowledge map to realize the automatic production of course content, such as automated storage of teaching content, adding subtitles, automatic translation, etc. - Online education will build a new digital and intelligent evaluation system:
It includes automatic assessment, intellectual diagnosis, and national ranking of millions of online model tests; curriculum quality monitoring, English pronunciation recognition, error-prone questions, and learning mode analysis; Also a new education system using digital and intelligent. Technology will profoundly change the traditional learning system, evaluation system, and the interaction between teachers and students to make teaching a natural, smooth, and comprehensive communication. - Cloud full-stack solutions will become the critical support of online education.
At present, the online training includes open class, live broadcast, on-demand, VR / AR to “1v1”, multi-person interactive teaching, student exchange learning, and other forms, and more new ways may appear in the future. It means that the technical demand stack of online education is extraordinarily complex and unknown, which may be from support Tens of thousands of people online, multiple interactions, automatic translation, and so on. Online education enterprises need innovative solutions that iterate quickly on the cloud.
For example, during the epidemic, Alibaba cloud, Damoyuan, Youku, nailing’s full-stack solution, with Alibaba cloud as the core primary platform, combined with nailing, Youku, small programs, customer’s app, and other terminal capabilities, provides a variety of convenient and fast innovation services.
Organizing online, creative collaboration, and business digitalization will determine the winners of online education companies.
If online education enterprises want to develop rapidly, high efficiency, low cost, and fast collaboration, online and digital organization collaboration of the teaching team and operation team are imperative. In particular, digital and intelligent marketing and teaching services are essential.