The numbers provided by the largest education platform in China surpassed every forecast with an 180.9 percent year-over-year increase in net revenues, and 135.2 percent in gross billings. The number of paying students doubled to 40 thousand from 2015, providing the program with over $135 billion gross billings contributed just by K-12 students. COE provides Chinese students with live one-on-one interactive English lessons taught by foreign teachers (mostly American ones) with either online or mobile platforms. The education program is a first effort to provide teaching courses in a fully digitalized environment, and takes full advantage of the informatics medium to pool all the data analyzed as well as teacher feedback in order to improve its efficiency year by year.
But the Chinese example is just one practical example of how digital learning and online E-learning courses may represent the future of human education in and out of schools. The integration of courses with social environments, the introduction of chatbots, and the use of chats to run Q&A sessions are just a few of the many elements that contributed to the quick evolution of E-learning since it was pioneered by giants such as Blackboard Inc. Even the appalling necessity of having to physically travel to a university or school to attend a course has been removed by the widespread diffusion of the web conferences. In a recently-published case study, the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) successfully used the ClickMeeting platform to manage several of its events with a dynamic series of webinars.
However, the evolution of digital learning is not just appealing to students, but to teachers and freelance consultants working in the education environment as well. The E-learning market size never stopped growing in the last ten years, and it is expected to reach $31 billion in revenue by the end of 2020. Personalized content delivery platforms such as Kajabi, LearningCart or Ruzuku are becoming more popular since they allow a single individual to build and plan their own online courses which can be then advertised with Mailpro and Drip thanks to the constant improvement in software integration. And that goes far beyond university teaching and advanced workshops: even normal people can now easily sell their own personal businesses, ranging from classic exercise & workout programs and self-empowerment training, to the most eccentric Chakra-balancing, spiritual awareness online courses.
Just like the various platforms integrate themselves to reach larger audiences, the COE announced its recent partnership with two large U.S.-based academic centers, the American International School of Utah (AISU) and the American International Schools, LLC (AIS). AIS and AISU will be used as an institutional base to support next year’s English teaching program and will collaborate in lesson development, teacher training and recruitment and academic research.
