Under the trigger of "one yuan course", how can online education platforms seize the high ground?

In 2011, New Oriental Youneng Middle School took the lead in launching a "50 yuan course" promotion, which attracted a large number of students and parents to inquire and sign up, snatching the student source and redividing the education and training market share. Good Future, which is on par with it, immediately launched the "one yuan to learn one subject" activity to fight back against New Oriental, kicking off the "one yuan course" war in the education and training industry. The so-called "one yuan course" refers to low-priced or free courses that can be learned online or offline launched by educational institutions to the market. With the embrace of education giants, the one yuan course came into being and began to become a marketing tool for many companies. Since its online birth, traditional education companies and new online education platforms have joined in.

From offline to online, the true meaning of "one-yuan course" of New Oriental and Xueersi

In this "Internet +" era, the traditional offline education institutions' ground-based promotion methods are far from meeting market demand. The Internet can achieve fast and wide publicity effects, so the Internet has gradually become one of the common publicity methods for major training institutions.

As Pan Xin, vice president of New Oriental Online, said: "We hope to leverage the Internet's natural borderless advantages to extend the highest-quality K12 training courses to a wider range of students. We also hope to use this one-yuan course to accelerate the migration of K12 students to online learning." So New Oriental Online took advantage of the hot momentum of the "One Yuan Course" offline and pushed it to the Internet, becoming the first educational institution to move the "One Yuan Course" big discount event online.

New Oriental Online once launched a limited-time flash sale on its online platform, covering all subjects for primary, middle and high schools, at a huge discount on the eve of summer vacation. After successfully purchasing the course, users can study online or go to a nearby New Oriental institution to study.

For a product like education that has long-term service attributes, launching a "one-yuan course" in the form of a flash sale can not only attract the audience's attention and create a wide-ranging dissemination effect, but also quickly occupy part of the market and leverage New Oriental's brand advantages to create a good online course word-of-mouth publicity effect.

But there are also problems. First, because it is online, compared with offline lectures, it is difficult for the audience to grasp the quality of the course, and the course packages offered are too diverse, which may make it difficult for the audience to make a decision. Secondly, whether the online teachers can guarantee that the children’s course experience can achieve the same or even better offline education results is also a question that needs to be considered.

Xueersi Online School also launched a big move, offering 10 summer classes for one yuan. It hopes to let more students experience a new online learning method through the "one yuan class", and to make learning more efficient. It launched two types of online classes for primary school students to enter junior high school and new junior high school students in the "live broadcast + tutoring" course model. This dual-teacher classroom model of "live broadcast teacher" and "tutor" also marks the advent of the online education 3.0 era.

It is understood that "live broadcast + tutoring" means that the lecturer teaches in a 1-to-N manner at a fixed time, while the tutor tutors the students outside the classroom at a teacher-student ratio of 1 to 50. In contrast, the traditional online classroom model mostly puts courses online in the form of recorded broadcasts for students to choose to study. It is more useful for college students and working people with strong self-control and clear goals, but for K12 students who have difficulty concentrating and poor self-control, the classroom without interaction may be more boring and difficult to persist.

Moreover, recording and broadcasting is equivalent to pure listening to the class, and it loses the control and constraints of the actual classroom. The computer is right in front of you, and it is easy to be distracted by various forms of entertainment, which makes it impossible to control the students' learning process and make it difficult to track the learning effect. However, Xueersi's "live broadcast + tutoring" model allows teachers and students to interact with each other, improve students' attention and make the class more interesting. With the assistance of tutors, students' problems can be solved in time, and homework can be corrected and revised.

However, this new dual-teacher classroom model also has many problems. First, this model cannot fully mobilize students' enthusiasm like offline classes, and the interactivity still cannot achieve the effect of offline classes; second, there is a lack of interaction between students, such as interactive exercises and group discussions, and online classes are still prone to deviation, forming an indoctrination-style teaching, which cannot improve students' independent thinking ability; finally, teachers cannot grasp the status of students in front of the screen, which means that teachers are required to do more preparation than offline classes, and to pre-conceive the status and various possibilities of students in front of the screen, so as to stabilize students' attention as much as possible and mobilize students' enthusiasm.

Taking advantage of pure online learning, 51Talk and Hujiang Online School take "one-yuan course" as the market pioneer

In addition to the strong offensive of New Oriental Online and Xueersi Online School's innovative "one yuan course", many pure online education institutions have also joined the battle.

For example, 51talk's courses include: workplace English, adult English, primary school English, and youth English, and one-on-one foreign teacher courses are its main featured courses. In order to further expand its market share, 51talk has also launched corresponding promotional activities, offering one-on-one foreign teacher courses at a huge discount price of 15 yuan per class. One-on-one courses have always been the most expensive and the most profitable courses, and are also the classroom model that online education focuses on developing, which shows its determination to fight hard.

It is understood that the current pricing of K12 online English education platforms on the market ranges from 10 yuan per class to 150 yuan per class, depending on the class type and the teacher. 51talk mainly uses Filipino foreign teachers, with low teacher costs. It launched a 1-on-1 foreign teacher activity at a price of 15 yuan per class, and the loss of tuition subsidies is not large. Launching a 1-on-1 foreign teacher activity at a low price can not only attract traffic, but also convert the one-on-one student source into a small class through subsequent measures to reduce costs and increase profits. From this point of view, 51talk's low price will be more competitive in the mid- and low-end user groups.

However, such low-priced courses will also bring negative pressure to institutions. First, the customer acquisition cost of Children's English Online is higher than that of New Oriental. It is reported that its customer acquisition cost is generally between 800-1000 yuan, while that of New Oriental is around 200 yuan. This disparity has aggravated the speed and amount of money burning of online institutions. In other words, low-priced courses are not profitable in the short term. In addition, subsidies for teachers and online publicity will further increase costs, and the initial investment is quite large. Even though the Internet's borderless publicity advantages and the low-priced 1-on-1 foreign teacher activities will attract a large number of users for the institution, it will also take medium- and long-term conversions to achieve profitability, which tests whether the institution has strong capital to fight a protracted war.

Furthermore, in the one-to-one teaching model, if there are too many users rushing to buy, whether the classes can be scheduled accurately so that students can have classes at the appropriate time? In other words, it is necessary to ensure that there are enough teachers and the quality of teachers' classes must be guaranteed.

Let's take a look at the "One Yuan Shuang Xue Class" promotion launched by Hujiang Online School. This promotion covers a full range of courses such as further studies, studying abroad, language, and workplace interests. It is reported that for only one yuan, users can choose any course they like to study, aiming to promote its all-round and professional platform features.

Hujiang Online School uses the advantages of the Internet to integrate all teaching resources into different categories, and attracts and promotes other products on its platform through the low-price activity of "one yuan course", which makes the audience like it with its comprehensiveness. In addition, Hujiang Online School also took advantage of the extremely popular live broadcast platform in recent years to launch the CCtalk professional live broadcast platform, opening up the era of online teachers where everyone can be a teacher, providing an online live broadcast platform for people with educational ideals and teaching without boundaries.

However, the large number of courses and the uneven quality of teachers have aggravated the audience's feeling of being at a loss when choosing, wasting too much time in the selection process and even giving up the idea of ​​learning here. In short, whether it is an online or offline training institution, its core competitiveness is still the teachers and teaching research. If an institution wants to grow and last for a long time, it must not only position its own characteristics, but more importantly, ensure the quality of teaching through professional teaching and research to win the audience's good reputation.

The “one yuan course” is subject to short-term effects. How to fight this protracted battle?

Whether it is the "one yuan course" model launched by New Oriental Online and Xueersi Online School, which use an online and offline linkage model, or the "one yuan course" model launched by pure online institutions such as 51Talk, which attracts traffic at low prices, they all have their drawbacks and limitations.

Firstly, the one-yuan course is a long-term, slow revenue-generating model that has no short-term returns and requires a protracted war, which tests the confidence, patience and capital of training institutions; secondly, due to the high cost of acquiring customers in online education, the "one-yuan course" carries tremendous financial pressure, which means that it can only be used in periods of huge K12 market demand such as winter and summer vacations, and can only be launched in the form of discounts on some courses; thirdly, the user experience of online courses is very important. Under the pressure of slow profit, the quality of the courses must be guaranteed, and after-class tracking services cannot be ignored; finally, education and training is rational consumption after all. Unlike ordinary commodities that can be arbitrarily slashed and promoted without bottom line, high-quality teaching content should become a valuable IP.

In the Internet era, since the "one-yuan course" model can attract a large number of audiences, its development will also move to a new level. First, with the support of student learning data, big data technology can be used in the future to analyze students' course status, the degree of absorption of classroom content, and the degree of after-class application, and analyze and compare the textbooks of various regions with the scope and difficulty of the high school entrance examination and college entrance examination, and study the most suitable personalized electronic textbooks, derivative products, interesting and vivid classroom models and course content for students, and even achieve the most appropriate teacher-student match in hundreds of high-capacity classrooms, so as to truly teach students in accordance with their aptitude.

Secondly, we can combine artificial intelligence to highly centralize and analyze teaching resources, and use AI to teach online students to improve the error tolerance of classroom teaching. This can not only minimize the cost of teachers, but also truly solve educational problems such as imbalanced teacher resources and regional differences in education.

Overall, although the "one-yuan course" has its drawbacks and limitations, its advantages should not be underestimated. Through continuous improvement through research on audience experience, the "one-yuan course" model will become a powerful tool for online education platforms to seize market share.

Liu Kuang, uses Zen to comprehend the Internet, WeChat public account: liukuang110

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.