As we discussed before, online education, or private education in general, in China is largely about learning English and preparing for studying overseas. It’s no wonder Internet veterans would start from an online English teaching service, or building a platform like Juesheng for users to choose services that would help them go study abroad.
Different from the online education market Taobao would like to establish, Juesheng would assess a user’s prior knowledge and then recommend products, from English classes to financial aid. Payments from users are supposed to be shared with teachers or agencies on Juesheng platform.
Co-founded by former vice president of Qunar, the leading travel search service in China, Juesheng’s model is similar to Qunar that 1) integrates all the information for users to search for, 2) tries to bring products for users’ benefits (price comparison in Qunar’s case).
New Oriental Education has been working on helping Chinese students prepare for studying abroad for more than a decade, running offline schools and consulting services. Yu Minhong, its CEO, said his company would rather be a content provider other than a platform.
Mr. Dai with Juesheng agrees with Yu that that’s New Oriental’s core competence, but what he and his team want to disrupt is the whole market that isn’t transparent. He thinks the current education market is like the travel market when Ctrip was just launched. Thanks to Ctrip, users were so much more informed of prices and services on the market. And with the model, Ctrip made profits from commissions and became the largest online travel service in China. Qunar, having integrated Ctrip and other similar services, makes the market even more transparent.
Sound reasoning? Sounds so. But online education in China is really at an early stage.