In recent years, online education has become a major trend, and it has also attracted an influx of capital.
After the online education companies represented by Good Future and GSX successfully went public in the United States, they accelerated the capital's pursuit of online education as a catalyst. With the injection of a large amount of capital, the online education industry has begun a trend of "barbaric growth".
This year's epidemic has once again accelerated its development speed. Relying on the right time and place, the online education industry is developing rapidly. All things are pros and cons coexist, and under the "barbaric growth", the problem will be exposed.
On October 19, the news that "Xueersi Online School APP was interviewed by the network information department due to vulgar content" attracted widespread attention, and at the same time brought the chaotic development of the online education industry to the attention of everyone.
Although the official Xueersi Online School clarified afterwards, the issue had been rectified four months ago, and it was not a violation again. But this is not the first time that the online education industry has exposed problems.
These chaos closely accompany the online education industry and have affected its development to a certain extent. Although the epidemic has contributed to the rapid development of online education, it has also surfaced the hidden chaos of the industry.
The following is a simple inventory of the current problems in the entire online education industry.
After the barbaric growth, the online education industry is full of loopholes
1. Marketing routines emerge in endlessly, induce users to consume, and it is easy to pay and return money is difficult
You can often see advertisements for online learning courses under the slogan of "zero yuan learning". This kind of "zero yuan learning" consumption method has attracted many consumers to experience it. Under the temptation of such free learning, many consumers just fell into the scam of the business.
In fact, a large part of this kind of "zero yuan learning" is a scam. On the black cat complaint platform, there are countless complaints against such activities, and most of the content is deliberately increasing the difficulty of punching in, modifying the rules of punching in, and deliberately guiding to give up the punching.
In addition, the issue of prepayment has also emerged. Recently, news of online education institutions has repeatedly broken out, and most of these institutions provide prepayment services. After the thunderstorm, a large number of consumers were unable to defend their rights and suffered huge economic losses.
Although in August 2018, the State Council’s “Opinions on Regulating the Development of Off-campus Training Institutions” clearly stated that off-campus training institutions for primary and secondary school students should not charge fees that span more than 3 months at a time. But this only applies to offline educational institutions, while online educational institutions are not classified.
There are many marketing methods, and consumers cannot protect their rights after problems... These problems make consumers have a certain degree of rejection of online education.
2. The quality of education content is uneven, and the threshold for teachers is low
Compared with offline education institutions, the quality of online education teaching content is poor. In China, test-oriented education is prevalent. Almost all teaching content is carried out around examination standards, while the development and innovation of content has stagnated.
In addition, a large number of online education institutions are poorly qualified, and the teaching content is only used from other platforms. Due to the lack of relevant industry standards and entry barriers, the level of teachers for teaching is not guaranteed. Anyone can become a "teacher" for online education as long as they read the textbooks.
Not only that, the appearance of vulgar content in Xueersi Online School APP is an example. Online education companies failed to review teaching content, which led to such incidents.
3. Difficulty in identifying teaching effects and low user acceptance
The characteristic of the education industry is that it is difficult to quantify the effect. Take the more popular Steam education as an example. Its teaching direction is mainly aimed at improving the quality of children, and it is difficult to see obvious results. For a long time, users will not be able to see obvious changes, and will naturally question the quality of their teaching, and even lead to doubts about the entire online education.
The quantification of teaching effects has always been a problem surrounding the entire education industry. In order to quantify the effect, there is only one way to be more intuitive at present, but this is more difficult for online education. How to solve this problem requires the joint research of the entire online education industry
4. Difficulty in profitability and high difficulty in realizing
At present, consumers are still skeptical about online education. In order to attract users, many online education institutions choose to launch free experience courses or low-cost courses to expand the source of students. Although the number of users has been increased on the surface, there are huge losses behind it.
Low-cost courses and free courses make it more difficult for users to convert into paying users, and the unit price per customer is also reduced. The longer this situation continues, the lower the user’s pricing range for courses will form a nauseating cycle. Once the course price is increased later, the number of users may be lost.
In addition to this, online education has not been able to cut teaching costs, further reducing its profitability. It is not difficult to understand why even the top online education companies still fall into huge losses.
5. Chaotic expansion, lack of standardization and management in the industry
In fact, the current online education industry is still in a state of expansion to seize territory. Almost all Internet companies were unable to escape the curse of "spending money to grab territory" in the early stages, and the same is true for online education with Internet genes.
In order to attract more users, online education companies continue to spend money and launch various marketing activities. This makes the losses of online education companies that are already struggling to make profits worse.
In the second quarter of 2020, the leading online education company GSX had an operating loss of 161 million yuan, while NetEase Youdao had a net loss of 258 million yuan. This is only the top companies that have been listed. In contrast, the status of those companies that have not yet been listed can be imagined.
At the same time, the online education industry has gradually developed in recent years with the deepening of the Internet. Relatively speaking, the development time is relatively short, which makes the entire online education industry develop in an environment that lacks constraints. This is why there are problems such as low level of teachers and chaotic marketing.
Risks have increased dramatically, how should investment institutions avoid risks?
For investment institutions, although it is indeed an excellent opportunity to invest in the online education industry, the current risk is extremely high.
The online education industry does have a huge market, but as the influx continues to increase, the entire industry has been extremely saturated.
According to data, from January to July 2020, a total of 25,000 online education companies across the country were registered. There is still capital entering the online education industry, and the entry of a large number of enterprises has put the entire industry into a state of fierce competition.
Blind expansion makes these companies too dependent on capital blood transfusion. Due to the difficulty of profitability and blind expansion, this makes the risk increase with its step-by-step expansion.
This not only affects the development of online education companies, but is also a haze surrounding many investment institutions.
When investing in online educational institutions, investment institutions need to carefully analyze their business models and future development plans. At the same time, they can also examine their current curriculum content to determine whether they have investment value, so that in the current fierce competition In the market, invest in enterprises with development value.
Problems occur frequently, how can consumers not fall into the hole?
At present, the entire online education industry is still in the expansion stage, and various companies have poor control over the quality of courses. Therefore, consumers need to carefully select the courses they want to buy to avoid being deceived.
Not only that, consumers also need to choose larger companies as much as possible to prevent the risk of running away from thunderstorms and causing economic losses. According to statistics from iResearch, nearly 12,000 online English education institutions have declared bankruptcy, and this is only a subdivision of the entire online education.
In the final analysis, consumers should raise their awareness of fraud prevention, carefully identify the qualifications of educational institutions, try their best to choose well-established educational institutions with a good reputation, and don't be greedy for cheap. After all, the sky will not lose pie.
Where to go for online education caught in a barbaric growth cycle?
Today's online education industry has fallen into a vicious circle of barbaric growth, but it must make some changes if it wants to develop more in the long term.
First of all, online education companies should jointly establish an industry standard to refine relevant regulations, especially in terms of marketing, to ensure consumer rights. For institutions joining the online education industry, a qualification review system should be established to prevent some illegal institutions from affecting the development of the entire online education industry under the name of online education.
Secondly, online education companies cannot blindly expand, and only focus on the pursuit of increasing the number of users and expanding the coverage. They face great hidden dangers behind the rapid development. Should carefully investigate the current market conditions, so as to formulate a development plan that is more in line with the current stage of development.
In addition, online education institutions also need to improve the quality of teaching content, not only need to increase the review of teaching content, but also to improve the ability to create new teaching content. As for the teaching force of online education, it is also necessary to have relevant standards to control, so as to help lead the entire online education towards professionalization and standardization.
At the same time, it is also necessary to clarify the difference between online education and offline education. Can the relevant regulations and provisions established for offline education be combined with online education? These are the directions that the online education industry can explore in the future.
Conclusion
With the gradual advancement of Internet technology, the education industry will inevitably develop towards online education in the future. Online education can be said to be an inevitable development direction of the education industry in the future. But at present, the entire online education industry is still in a huge bubble. To go further, it is indispensable to burst this "savage growth" bubble.
Article source: Songguo Finance, please indicate the copyright