Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

According to the recent report from IDC (IDC.com), the IT demand in the education industry will be much higher (14.3%) than the IT demands in other areas. The CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of the IT expenditures in the education industry will be a steady growth of 15% annually. By the year 2009, the estimated marketing value of Educational IT industry will reach 4.4093 billion US dollars. This value includes computer hardware, software, network infrastructure, servers, database etc...

An interesting observation I have had in regard to the current Chinese educational IT industry is that the hardware infrastructure is quite advanced in schools. However, there is a high demand in the software, content and service areas. The fiber optical cables have been laid out quite nicely between the education institutes. But many networks are lack of quality online learning content. The market is highly profit driven instead of the learners' demands.

The well recognized online language training provider in China - "New Oriental Online" recently decided to permanently lower their online course tuition. They have lowered their business writing and conversational courses from 500 Yuan (80 CAD$) to 75 Yuan(12 CAD$), Adult Standard English Training courses from 200 Yuan (30 CAD$) to 50 Yuan (8 CAD$). They also bundle their courses such as take 1 for 50, 2 for 80 and 3 for only 100 Yuan. Beside the standard online courseware, New Oriental also rolls out subject based training packages such as vocabulary building training, culture English training etc. Each smaller package listed a 10-20 Yuan (<3 CAD$). Other online training courses such as Financial training programs have also lowered their prices by 60%-70%.

According to the New Oriental officials, the reason behind this dramatic cost reduction is the new technology that being used to produce online course materials have lowered the overall cost dramatically. My previous experience tells me that New Oriental always have a way to reduce the production cost and creating easy-to-upgrade online content. This allows them to stand out and succeed in the high competition market in online language training. However, my personal opinions that the courseware are still self-study focused and the production cycles are still at low quality but high quantity stage. New Oriental still has some road ahead of them to keep up with the continuously growing global e-Learning market.

Guess I was a little bored this afternoon and decided to give it a try to the Chinese game platform I found last night. I have to say I am impressed by the high quality media (sound, graphics and animation) components in the game. The entire game is done in Flash with dynamic data transfer. I can totaly see an 8 years old kid being amused by the interactive cartoon figure - "xiao tian tian" (the little girl on the screen capture). Three minutes into the game, it polled me on how do I learn new knowledge: A) Reading B)Browsing Internet C)Watching TV D)Ask Parents/Teacher. It then showed me what other kids have chosen, and realizing only 19% of them browse internet. Of course I don't know how many players have being polled, but this is a very interesting concept on collecting first hand data from the varies of group of learners out there. I then learned why people "flush" (how blood flow turn people's face red etc.), and answered an easy question, then got my 5 award cards! Yay! A few more minutes I am gonna be hooked to the platform... The game is free, but it does indicate that you may "upgrade" (buy their printed books) in order to get more "power cards" for credits... Anyway, great product! Gonna browse a bit more...

An internet based eduation game was launched in Shanghai this week - "The Legendary Journey". This project is an joint venture between the East China Normal University Press and a Hong Kong communication corporation. The game was created based on the traditional curriculum and currently covers grade 1-5. The middle school and high school versions are currently under development.

The currently game is designed for the audience between 6 to 11 years of age. The platform contains components:

"daily journey", like personal diary or blog. It is aimed to help the kids to practice their writing skill. I remember I was ordered to write diaries daily back in grade 3, of course it was paper based only.

"cool knowledge base", non-boring knowledge, daily knowledge, like encyclopedia, media based...

"hot card collection", like Pockymon? Nicely designed cartoon characters that kids would love to collect and trade. Works as a credit collection process.

"journey tracking system", keeps a track of the character's travelling history. Used as student performance tracking system.

"general ranking system", uses ranks to lay out an hierarchy which creates competitions between the kids. The have something like "King of Math", "Queen of English" etc...

And much more features. It looks really fun to me, and I would love to know how the kids think of it...

For more information, please go to: http://e-legends.yikeyilian.com/

Rumors say leading universities in China are constructing a joint project to produce (or collaborate with the existing technology - Turnitin.com) a Chinese character/documentation recognition/comparison site to help instructors to prevent assignment plagiarism.

Just read an up-to-date marketing report on Chinese IT training industry. The report is written in Chinese, here is my translation:

Summary on Chinese IT Training and Education 2004

Chinese IT training and education market generated 3.35 billion Yuan in sales (approximately 558 million Canadian dollars) in the year 2004, a 16.3% increase over 2003.

Marketing Structure
From product and service point of view, basic IT training (28.7%) and internet application training (22.7%) played two important roles in the market, them together generated over 50% of the total profit. The other IT training sectors that worth to mention are: software development training (14.7%), database administration (11.1%), operating systems and desktop publishing (18.2%).

Vertical Analysis:
Corporate training continuously to be the main form of demand in this market, it converts over 75% of the total IT training marketing profit. There was an obvious increase in demand from the enterprise and government in the previous year. Here is the break down list based on profit based on the demands from the year 2003 to 2004: Education (50 million RMB, 8.7%), Government (261, 24.9%), Family/Home/Residential (510, 6.5%), large size enterprise (1530, 19.5%), medium size enterprise (849, 16.4%), small size enterprise (150, 9.5%), total 3.35 billion RMB.

Parallel Analysis:
Communication, Finance, Energy and Manufacture are four major sectors in the IT training industry. Here is the break down list based on industrial demands: Communication (610 million RMB, 21.8% increase), Construction (6, 0.0%), Transportation (280, 6.9%), Education (50, 8.7%), Finance (567, 20.1%), Research (30, 7.1%), Mobilization (210, 2.4%), Media (290, 3.6%), Energy (420, 18.0%), Health (250, 8.7%), Dawk (420, 5.0%), Government (260, 24.9%), Manufacture (420, 21.4%) and Others (400, 11.7%), total 3.35 billion RMB.

Geographic Analysis:
Central China continuously had the largest on IT training over other areas in China. However, North West regions are catching up. North East and South West are slowing down.

Brand Names:
Top five IT training co-operations: Beijing University APTECH, NIIT, Chinese Academy of Science Software Training Centre, ATEC and DigitalChina. These five companies control over 40% of the IT training market in China.

One of the biggest in the IT training industry is the web based training is replacing face-to-face training. This trend will continue it's momentum in the year 2005. The original Chinese document is located here:

http://www.chinabyte.com/busnews
/216486142927699968/20050304/1918267.shtml#

The first content sharing initiative for city wide (provincial wide considering the unique identity of Shanghai)education in China was launched today: “Shanghai Education Resources Center”. This is a resource sharing database for over 150,000 educators across Shanghai. This network took over a year to plan and build; it is one of the major milestones in the e-Learning plans initiated by Shanghai government.

The project involves Shanghai education television channel, Shanghai Electronic Education Department and ten other public/private vendors. This network covers topics from pre-school to adult continuing studies. It contains not only learning objects as sounds and images, but also whole packaged contents as courseware and sharable curriculums. The educators may use the network to train, inspire and communicate with others. Learners may also directly absorb knowledge from this network with many exciting educational games and over 7000 hours of audio/video learning objects. Some future plans about the network includes connecting to the national standard testing database, supplemental text books, teachers evaluations. There is a well built flash interface for this network, and an limited English introduction. So, check it out yourself.

http://www.sherc.net/sherc/english/index.jsp

US based education group McGraw-Hill announced that it will invest in Chinese online education service provider PRCedu last week. The company and an unnamed US fund will invest 150 million Yuan (25 million CAD$) in total in PRCedu. PRCedu was founded in 1998 and its current investors include Citibank and IDG. Most of the 68 online universities licensed by the Ministry of Education are PRCedu partners. (pacificepoch)

I think it's the time for all the big identities (Publishers, Media Companies, Entertainment Corporations) to finally realize online learning is the future and it will change the way people seeking for information and solution in daily life. So, instead of waiting till e-Learning get taken over by new, independent companies, these giants will simply invest and "buy" the future today. I believe we shall see more publishers invest into e-Learning industry in 2005.

China National Publications Import & Export Corporation presented their joint project with eyouCT (WebCT) on CNPC ECourse (ePack) packages at the China Bilingual High Education Conference. The project is to introduce ePack to the Chinese post secondary insitutes. The presentation used two successful studies: ePack being used in University of Yale and Hong Kong City University. It definitely brought attention to many institutional participants at the conference. Although the demand of bilingual instructions being used at the post secondary level is still limited in China, but the first impression on ePacks were still overwhelming. Many institutional representatives favored the package due to the simplicity and well published learning contents. I personally think ePack did not impact the American e-Learning industry well enough in the past 5 years. However, due to the increasing demand of bilingual instructions in China and the lack of foreign online learning resources, ePack make be the right product to the Chinese bilingual education market.

CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) just released their newest survey result on the newest Internet Development in China. Total internet users in China exceeded 94 million by the end of 2004, about one half of the amount of internet users in the U.S. (180 million). Among them, the number of broadband users was 42.80 million. In the mean time, the number of computer hosts in China has raised to 41.60 million, an increase of 14.6% over the past 6 months. The numbers of domain names and websites registered under .CN were 432077 and 668900, increasing by 50000 and 43000 respectively, compared with the figures of 6 months ago. The bandwidth of international connection has reached 74429M; the total number of IPv4 addresses allocated to China has been 59945728, presenting a half-year growth of 38 percent and 21 percent respectively.

In additional to this, CNNIC also studied the diversity of the usage. The studies shows the information concerned by the netizens was no longer just focused on news. The figures from the report unveil the following results: as for the information that was mostly inquired, 29.3% users believed educational information was the mostly inquired information, 13.8% took automobile info and 24.2% considered recruitment info; as for the Internet services, the following Internet services or functions are still developing rapidly: Email, search engine, online banking, online trading, online advertisements, news, Internet games, among which, Email is still one of the most concerned Internet applications. The satisfactory degrees of the users for charged email and free email are 32.6% and 71.9% respectively.

The report tells that the primary reasons for non-Internet users not to access the Internet are that they do not know how to use computer/Internet (40.1%) and that there is no facility to access the Internet (23.1%). The level of the development of education and economy is still the main factor to limit the improvement of Internet. Thus, to facilitate the enhancement of the Internet in China, the promotion of the fundamental knowledge of Internet must be intensified and the local economy be greatly developed. (CNNIC "15th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China")

The Beijing government launched a staff training network last November. The current daily traffic to the web site is exceeding 2.5 million. The training network uses many advanced media based learning materials such as video on demand, animations, and video conferencing. Participants in the network are mainly government workers varies from the mayor to the secretaries. It is focused to provide the HR Management Trainings, Political Trainings, Cultural Trainings, Technology Trainings, Business Trainings and Social Management Trainings. All of the learning contents in the network are up-to-date and some of the newest information are pumped into the knowledge database on a daily basis.

This is only an experimental attempt for the Chinese government and the feed backs so far are overwhelming. There is a definitely a possibility that the Chinese national government will soon launch a national wide training system for all of their staff and thus It will be the largest government training site ever!

According to Blackboard’s marketing unit, they will increase their investment in the Chinese e-Learning market in the year 2005. There are currently over 40 institutes (universities, colleges and K12) using Blackboard in China to enhance their e-Learning environment. Blackboard had a joint adventure with kejiao.net.cn, together, they fired up a new company – CeBibo which will be their pioneer into the Chinese market.

CeBibo is a service provider that provides e-Learning solutions to the Chinese institutes using Blackboard technologies. Some big names that are using CerBibo’s elearning solution packages: Renmin University, Beijing University, Ocean University of China, Nankai University, and Harbin Institute of Technology. According to my “Chinese sources”, CeBibo is currently seeking for K12 clients in Shanghai.

CJK OSS = China Japan Korean Open Source Software Initiatives.

Under the support of the Ministry of Education in China, the Chinese OSS federation is planning to deploy linux based OS training courses in 35 universities plus 35 colleges. This initiative will be sponsored by Intel, IBM, HP, Novell and RedHat. There will be an additional sponsorship for software and Linus training/support over 100 Chinese post-secondary institutions.

Due to many reasons (Political, Military and Cultural), China has always been cautious about using Microsoft OS in government and educational organizations. This opens up room for OOS to grow at a high speed in China. The new Open Source business models may also be a key solution to the software piracy issues in Asia. (e.g. The product is free, we are now selling the service, how are you going to pirate our services?)