Focus On The "Last Mile" Of Digital Teaching Materials

Recently, the State Education Department has carried out special rectification on the chaotic off campus training market to explore the healthy development of education in the future. In this regard, people in the education industry believe that the key to the control of the chaos outside the school still needs to work hard inside the school. It needs to start from the "combination boxing", comprehensively consider the human resources, teaching resources, and investment, etc., and unswervingly take the classroom in the school as the main position.

Indeed, in the context of the information age, China's education development is in the critical period of improving quality and efficiency, and there are still many pain points in school education, which are worthy of serious consideration by all practitioners. For example, under the trend of digital transformation in various industries, the process of educational informatization seems not so "fast".

In order to find a real and effective solution of enabling education informatization, China Education cloud has never stopped thinking. The company's intelligent teaching integrated service platform with digital teaching materials and high-quality resources as its core engine - the cloud platform for digital teaching materials of China Education cloud came into being.

"Since the digital textbook cloud platform was officially launched in June 2020, in less than a year, it has been put into practice in nearly 100 cities and counties and nearly 10000 schools in China, and has achieved unexpected good reputation." Recently, Dr. Zhao Ziying, founder of the cloud platform for Chinese education cloud digital textbook, said in an exclusive interview with the 21st century economic report.

In the future, the platform will continue to expand the scope of promotion nationwide. At the same time, China Education cloud is also considering a new round of financing, in order to increase the investment in teacher training and technology research and development, and truly use technology to teach students according to their aptitude.

Breaking the isolated information island, standardizing digital resources and opening the "acceleration" of co construction and sharing

In view of the current situation of scattered resources and unclear standards in the education informatization industry, the cloud platform of Chinese education cloud digital teaching materials accurately cuts the pain point, and gathers the strength of all walks of life in a short time. All this stems from the profound understanding of education by the platform founding team.

It is understood that Dr. Zhao Ziying, founder of the platform, graduated from Beijing Normal University. She began to study the application of educational informatization during her master's degree, and was keenly aware of the pain points. She recalled that at that time, it was about 2007, and the annual investment in education informatization had exceeded 200 billion yuan. All over the country are actively building information systems, but there are actually repeated construction in this process.

For example, the learning system, educational administration system and management platform required by the school are all commissioned by different companies for bidding construction. Besides repeated construction, there is also a long-term information island. From the national, provincial, local to school, different digital platforms are difficult to get through, teachers and students are not convenient to use, and it is difficult to promote classroom teaching with information technology.

In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to the above situation and a series of policy guidelines have been obtained.

"Digital teaching materials are the basic resources for the deep integration of informatization and classroom teaching. If we set up an enterprise that deeply studies digital teaching materials, then gather all the forces of the industry, deposit the high-quality resources that meet the digital curriculum standards, and finally serve classroom teaching in an integrated form, it will effectively solve the pain points of the current education informatization construction. " Zhao Ziying said.

Along with this goal, the team started to build the platform in 2019. In less than two years, the core business of cloud digital textbook cloud platform of Chinese education was completed. Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University, Institute of curriculum and teaching materials, and more than 60 educational publishing enterprises, such as the people's education society, higher education society, FLTRP and Beijing Normal University Press, together with hundreds of educational resources and service providers such as 101 education group and super teaching and Research Office, as well as teaching and research institutions in various regions, have become the focus of the cloud platform of Chinese education cloud digital teaching materials We need partners.

"In the past, each publishing house had its own version of digital teaching materials. It was difficult to form a joint force among publishing houses. It was also a headache for schools to negotiate with manufacturers who were extremely scattered. Therefore, it is important to construct a standardized menu of digital textbooks and resources. What the Chinese education cloud platform hopes to achieve is to effectively integrate and output the domestic legitimate digital teaching materials and digital teaching resources through the Internet products, and build a digital course teaching product system suitable for different teaching modes. " Zhao Ziying said.

Unite forces to be the "Android" of the industry ecology instead of "apple"

Although there are also enterprises in the market doing digital teaching resources and other businesses, the difference between China Education cloud and China Education cloud is that it is determined to be the "Android" of the industry ecology rather than "apple".

"We are the integrators of the industry, we hope to gather high-quality resources on the platform, let everyone play their own advantages, in order to form the industry joint force." Zhao Ziying said.

Facing the current competition in the digital textbook market, Zhao Ziying said that the biggest advantage of China Education cloud is that the company belongs to the builder of the ecological system and the siphon of high-quality resources. The digital textbook resources used by the platform are all authorized by authoritative publishing houses and educational resource enterprises. There are a lot of cooperation between publishers and teaching auxiliary providers. This is the positive market feedback received in the construction process of the platform. Finally, resources are integrated by the platform to form standardized classroom teaching content.

"We are in the process of ecological construction. The company does not focus on the pursuit of high short-term profits, but hopes to distribute the profits to all enterprises participating in platform construction and resource construction as far as possible, enabling the digital transformation of textbook publishers and teaching auxiliary content producers, driving the overall digital transformation of the industry and looking for market increment." She said.

In the later stage, with the completion of the ecological system construction, teachers and students can be provided with stable and high-quality teaching resources, and the company's income and profits will also be expanded, so there is a lot of room for imagination of commercial value.

It is understood that the market scale of paper textbooks is nearly 30 billion yuan. The pricing of digital textbooks is basically based on the paper textbooks. We can see that this is also a market of tens of billions. At the same time, the market scale of national education informatization has exceeded 400 billion yuan. After the platform starts from the digital teaching materials, the future business will extend to the downstream of the industrial chain, and will also obtain broader development space.

Focusing on the "last mile", Chinese education cloud anchor "Internet + education service system"

Education informatization standard is a huge system engineering, from which standard to find the foothold of "Internet + education service" has always been the topic of active discussion of the industry. Because of its comprehensive implementation of curriculum standards, digital teaching materials are systematic, basic and vivid. They bear the basic teaching basis and the common requirements for all students' development. They play a leading role in all digital curriculum resources, and are one of the key keys to solve the "last mile" problem of education reform and information application integration.

The education resource service system with digital teaching materials as the core built by the cloud digital teaching material cloud platform of Chinese education has gradually taken shape. Compared with the traditional decentralized resource service, the service ability of the education big resource platform is gradually highlighted.

In 2020, the demand for digital teaching materials will surge due to the catalysis of the new crown epidemic situation, and China Education cloud will quickly gain recognition from a large number of users. It is understood that the cloud platform for Chinese education cloud digital teaching materials will be launched in 12 provinces including Shanxi, Ningxia, Jiangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, Shandong, Sichuan and Chongqing, and will provide support and services in several national smart education demonstration areas. By the end of 2020, the platform has entered nearly 10000 schools, covering more than 4 million users.

In addition to resource standards, the platform also strictly controls the service ability system that digital courses really need, so as to provide efficient assistance for teachers to improve their information literacy. As a result, the cloud platform of Chinese education cloud digital teaching materials has obtained the qualification of national training plan, and has undertaken the comprehensive demonstration project of "integration of information technology and teacher training" in 2020. At present, the platform has provided more than 600 training sessions related to educational informatization, covering 230000 teachers.

"The positive feedback from teachers has verified the significance of platform construction. The operation mode of providing a lot of training services is very hard, but we insist on doing the right thing instead of the easy thing." Zhao Ziying said.

She told reporters that taking digital teaching materials as the entrance to connect all software systems and data islands can finally provide complete, systematic, efficient and intelligent systematic intelligent teaching services for all levels of education departments and teachers and students, realizing "intelligent teaching, intelligent learning, intelligent auxiliary and intelligent management", which is the ultimate goal of the cloud platform for Chinese education cloud digital teaching materials.