Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

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.