New Opportunities in Online Education: Fragmented Time and Emotional Communities

Simply moving curricula and textbooks online, delivering one-size-fits-all rote instruction to all students, or selling "learning cards" and course CDs like other e-commerce sites—this was education's first brave attempt to leverage internet technology.

Unfortunately, this "traditional" model holds little appeal for learners in an era where personalization reigns, and it is easily replicated, making it difficult to build a stable profit model.

However, technological progress has opened a new door for optimists: mobile networks and social media are triggering a second wave of educational innovation, and investors are flocking to new online education concepts.

U.S. online education company CreativeLIVE has closed a new funding round, bringing its total financing to over $8 million. Founded in 2010, CreativeLIVE primarily offers training courses in photography, business, and design to entrepreneurs, with over 1 million students worldwide.

CreativeLIVE's investors are betting on the future global online education market, valued at $100 billion, where no single company has yet dominated.

What sets CreativeLIVE's business model apart is that first-time viewing of courses or live streams is free, while re-watching or downloading courses costs between $29 and $149. Another killer feature is that instructors are experts in their fields, such as Pulitzer Prize winner Vincent Laforet and Gale Tattersall, director of Photography for House, both of whom are CreativeLIVE lecturers.

Domestically, former co-CEO of Jiayuan.com, Gong Haiyan, founded "91waijiao.com"; educational social interaction site "Fenbi.com" received 10 million yuan from IDG; Qiming Venture Partners invested $15 million to help online education institution VIPABC expand in the Chinese market; and vocabulary-building site "Tuoci" received angel investment from ZhenFund.

Meanwhile, traditional education giants like EF and New Oriental are also accelerating their online education布局.

"The global English training market has a space of $5-6 billion, but online training currently accounts for only 1-2%. For us, there is still 98% of the market to explore," said Zhang Zhishen, President of EF Englishtown Greater China.

Competing for Fragmented Time

Learning in fragmented time on mobile platforms means learning anytime and anywhere. "The innovation of future learning will be in the mobile field," said Enio Ohmaye, Chief Technology and Teaching Experience Officer at EF Education First. This largest private English education institution in the world has found that China has the fastest-growing demand for both English and mobile applications. Therefore, EF first targeted China for mobile learning innovation.

"In the next 5-10 years, physical schools will become social venues for students," Zhang Zhishen said. "However, no matter how technology advances, no experience can match the effectiveness of face-to-face communication."

Thus, Zhang believes user experience is crucial for online education, requiring not only consideration of social networks, mobile access, and gaming's impact on education but also the integration of education, technology, and design.

EF's global R&D center in Shanghai currently employs over 250 software engineers, language, and education experts. They are responsible for applying technologies like mobile learning, speech recognition, social networks, and cloud computing to EF's learning platform. The iPad courseware developed by this center for Hult International Business School allows MBA students to connect with business school mentors anytime, and all students have started using iPads for some courses.

Enio Ohmaye, a former chief scientist at Apple, led the development of EF's language classroom teaching and online English interactive learning. He emphasized that MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are having an immeasurable impact on education. "A computer science course might have only 200 students at MIT, but online, over 100,000 people might register for it."

"It's worth noting that of those 100,000 registered users, only 14% complete the course, meaning online education still faces many challenges," Enio Ohmaye continued. He firmly believes that teaching methods are not the only factor affecting learning outcomes; many factors influence learner enthusiasm and results, such as learning purpose, pressure, and intensity.

"The biggest challenge is how to provide the best learning experience. No company has yet been particularly successful in bringing interactive learning into the education industry like online games," Enio Ohmaye said.

New Oriental's approach is to jointly develop a blended English learning product, TBL (Touchstone Blended Learning), with Cambridge University Press. Sun Chang, General Manager of New Oriental Online, explained, "The blended learning model matches offline and online content for each lesson, completing homework corrections, tracking student online learning progress and results, and enabling interaction."

The core concept of TBL is 24/7 learning, emphasizing self-study and close integration with traditional learning: traditional education focuses on "teaching," while this is truly "teaching and learning mutually reinforcing."

For these education giants, the advantage lies in having a large student base, but making their online applications stand out from thousands of others seems more urgent.

Community Emotional Education

Enio Ohmaye believes, "The basis for future educational innovation is the learner's emotional experience. For a product to succeed, marketing is crucial. Using social networks, marketing for educational products can now run through the entire user experience—from attraction, trial, use, feedback, to word-of-mouth recommendations. The stickiness between companies and users, old users, and new and old users is unprecedentedly strong."

Beyond product promotion, companies can also expand services along the learning demand chain on social platforms. Fenbi.com launched a mobile client app, similar to Weibo, as a communication platform between teachers and students. "We hope students can open their phones and find nearby teachers," a Fenbi employee said.

Video open course sharing site Duobei.com uses real-time streaming media technology to build a synchronous online interaction system for teachers and students, allowing them to log into virtual classrooms for real-time teaching and learning. Duobei.com also promotes the idea that anyone can become a teacher in a specific field.

Clearly, despite different target customers and market segments, interaction and communication have become the essence of online education, backed by scientific evidence. Research shows that emotions broadly impact learning—for example, happiness fosters new ideas, while sadness makes people focus more on solving specific problems. This has significant implications for online education product design.

Enio Ohmaye gave an example: a company spends $1 million on employee online English learning, and EF uses $15,000 of that to reward the best students by sending them to Cambridge for further study. This incentive ultimately had a positive effect on all employees involved in the training.

He believes that making online education attract learners actively rather than passively, like a gym, requires leveraging social and technological power to ignite people's passion. "Imagine learners promising friends in their circle that if they don't complete a task, they'll treat everyone to dinner—this might just cultivate good learning habits," Enio Ohmaye said.

Xue Dan, founder of online education site Tuoci, agrees that many designs in online education relate to learning psychology. For example, to control users' vocabulary memorization pace, Tuoci sets a countdown function; to prevent laziness, it counts only learning time, not online time.

"Our iOS app has high engagement because users pay 6 yuan for it, and we won't give up charging. Behind Tuoci's product is data mining technology that understands each user's habits, forming different review mechanisms," Xue Dan explained.

The question of whether to charge for an app still boils down to the challenge of monetization.

Li Feng, an IDG investment partner who worked at New Oriental for eight years, said education is a business that needs to balance commerce and value. "Education is a combination of factors: listening to the teacher is the biggest part, followed by atmosphere, teacher-student interaction, testing, counseling, and even falling in love in class," he mused. "Now, the most important factor has become the learner's lifestyle. One-way content is easily internetized, while tool-based apps have more potential, as long as they keep users online and using them frequently."

Selected from Duozhi.com