Lerni.cn is a platform for private educational services in China to manage their schools. Registering as a headmaster, you can manage all your teachers, class schedules, etc. Then you can assign several assistants to arrange class schedules for teachers and help you manage teachers and students.
Teachers can see the class timetable on Lerni. They will be required to check into each class on the timetable. Teachers can upload and share with students teaching materials on the platform. Consumers, students and their parents, can see arrangements for them and information about all the classes they have purchased with the school.
China’s private education market has been growing fast, although it is largely about preparing children for various entrance exams or studying broad, or adults for specialty certificate exams or other exams. Spending on Children’s education as a share of income is the second biggest, after that on housing, of the average Chinese family — to some it may even be the biggest.
New Oriental was one of the first private study centers in China after the government launched the Reform and Opening-up. Starting from preparing students, in order to apply to foreign universities, for exams such as GRE and IELTS, it later would cover all kinds of exams and become the first private education company that went public on the NASDAQ. After New Oriental, a wave of private study centers emerged in China, among which some like Xueda, TAL and Ambow grew big.
In the recent couple of years, China saw more and more private educational services as many Chinese parents don’t trust the public education, preferring to send their children to newly emerged private schools and even abroad. There were 100, 000 private educational services in China as of the end of 2012, according to Lerni.
Chinese entrepreneurs are building online education services; some are platforms for teachers or organizations to teach online with recorded videos or giving live classes, some are online social services for teachers to interact with students, by enabling them to upload teaching materials and answering questions from them, and some are transforming traditional teaching materials and moving them online for audiences to consume.
Lerni is like an enterprise software for study centers or other educational services. More than a few Chinese startups are building enterprise software. They bet that eventually all businesses would adopt enterprise software to improve efficiency or for convenience and they’d pay.