No matter how poor you are, you can’t be poor in education, and no matter how hard you are, you can’t suffer children. Under the influence of the values ​​recognized by the whole society from top to bottom, the investment in education has never been ambiguous.

According to the “2020 National Education Fund Implementation Statistical Express” released by the Ministry of Education at the end of April, the total investment in national education funds in 2020 is 5,301.4 billion yuan, an increase of 5.65% over the previous year. Among them, the national financial education funding was 4,289.1 billion yuan, an increase of 7.10% over the previous year.

In connection with the “Education Informatization 2.0 Action Plan” notice issued by the Ministry of Education in 2018, it pointed out that the future education should evolve in the direction of networking, digitization, intelligence, and personalization. According to the requirements of the “Ten-Year Development Plan for Education Informatization” issued by the Ministry of Education in 2011: Governments at all levels should list the education informatization funds according to the proportion of not less than 8% of the education funds, and the national education informatization funds in 2020 can be estimated. The scale of investment is at least more than 400 billion yuan.

It is also under the influence of strong policy support that in recent years, technology companies have been eyeing the sweet pastry of “educational informatization”. Among them, the most unexpected is “Dingding”, which became famous in 2020 due to the epidemic. Although it was beaten by a group of primary school students, it can be regarded as leading a wave of social attention to educational APPs.

However, due to the particularity of the basic education industry, the mode of savage growth will eventually be limited, and the behavior of other indiscriminate APPs and treating students and parents as leeks will also be restricted.

Just like the newly implemented Minors Protection Law, Article 33 stipulates that kindergartens and off-campus training institutions shall not conduct primary education courses for preschool-aged minors. This policy instantly caused many online education companies with explosive growth in 2020 to experience business contraction or stock price declines, including the “Homework Gang” that was often seen in streaming media advertisements not long ago. “Live”.

It is conceivable that although the education industry is worth doing, it is not easy to do. It is impossible to revel in it with capital alone, abide by the policy constraints, and sort out which products, solutions and business models can go stably and well? This is still a topic that the entrants are seeking up and down.

Family-oriented, C-end-oriented gameplay

Facing the family scene, what is mainly presented now is the scene where manufacturers are actively developing educational intelligent hardware products:

In October 2020, ByteDance launched a new education brand “Dali Education” and released the hardware product “Dali Smart Work Lamp”. In addition to emphasizing eye protection, intelligent tutoring is known as a highlight of this lamp. By equipped with an AI camera, Using artificial intelligence and related technologies, it can provide functions such as intelligent English follow-up reading, intelligent calculation problem explanation, intelligent fingertip word search, etc. At the same time, it is also equipped with an APP for parents to support real-time synchronization of children’s homework plans and completion progress, and remote viewing of children’s desks and real-time communication.

In addition, in March this year, Tencent Education released the “AILA Smart Homework Light”, focusing on students’ after-school homework and learning scenarios; and Alibaba Cloud and Xi’an Guide Education Technology Co., Ltd. jointly launched the “Guide Number Smart Homework Light”, which has eye protection In addition to the function of the lamp, it mainly provides real-time reminders for homework, remote homework guidance for parents, photo correction of homework, generation of learning reports and other functions.

Frankly speaking, the scene of manufacturers flocking to smart learning lights is similar to that of everyone doing smart speakers before. The fundamental purpose is to obtain a traffic entrance on the C side. Many functions are always similar, and the biggest difference lies in price and experience. feel. However, because learning lights have to weaken the entertainment element, manufacturers are still more restrained in creating content ecology. As for which brand can go more long-term, it has not yet been determined.

In addition to the form of learning lamps, the Youdao dictionary pen launched by NetEase Youdao seems to have become an important part of the company’s revenue:

According to the 2021 Q1 financial report released by NetEase Youdao recently, learning products composed of intelligent hardware have grown strongly, with a net income of 202 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 279.8%. Smart learning hardware gross margin reached 44.1%, the highest since listing, compared to 25.6% in the first quarter of 2020.

It is reported that the advantage of NetEase Youdao lies in the continuous strengthening of the software and hardware collaboration between “Youdao Dictionary” and “Youdao Dictionary Pen”. An important idea for a wide moat.

Other forms, such as the intelligent learning machine launched by iFLYTEK, which can synchronously and accurately learn with AI, are mainly for after-school problem scenarios, and support personalized practice recommendation for students; In general, only based on the different needs of C-end customers, educational intelligent hardware products with different functions can be derived. But now they are mostly scattered and fragmented, and we can expect them to form a larger ecosystem of smart products in the future.

For schools, the applications of To B and To G are more colorful

In addition to the family, the school is the place where teachers and classmates spend the longest time, and the focus of educational informatization still lies in solving various problems that can be encountered on campus.

For example, campus security, many campus security incidents have occurred recently. The most typical problems are that the traditional campus security management has low monitoring efficiency, cameras are not connected to the Internet, and monitoring has dead ends. In many cases, it can only be done retrospectively. Predict in advance or call the police immediately. And some access control methods are not convenient, intelligent and efficient enough. Many registration work needs to be done manually by staff, and omissions or errors are inevitable.

All in all, schools have the most urgent need for smart security solutions. And based on the development of Internet of Things, cloud computing, edge computing, AI and other technologies, cameras are becoming more and more intelligent. In general, security camera companies such as Hikvision, Dahua, and Uniview Technology have the ability to Provide intelligent video surveillance solutions, as well as intelligent analysis functions such as face recognition and automatic vehicle recognition. When it comes to AI algorithms, there will also be Megvii Technology, Yuncong Technology, SenseTime, etc. Join the participation of AI companies.

For example, smart classrooms, from the perspective of manufacturers applying this concept, there are three main entry directions:

1) Sell the hardware equipment that students and teachers in the classroom often contact, including teaching tablets, smart blackboards, Electronic whiteboards, projectors, etc.;

2) Selling teaching software or teaching content for schools/teachers, including big data precision teaching, smart exams, smart marking, smart grading and correction, etc.;

3) Use the IoT concept to “arm” the rest of the basic hardware facilities in the classroom, including cameras, door locks, lights, fans/air conditioners, etc., which may involve concepts such as energy management, environmental monitoring management, and security monitoring.

Of course, according to different education levels, the content of smart classrooms is obviously different. For example, kindergartens still focus on video surveillance, and middle school and university classrooms are more likely to be selected as the overall solution provider for smart classrooms because of their higher demands. target scene.

The predicament of smart education

First of all, the attributes of smart education To G are still relatively strong, and the decision-making chain is often complicated, which not only causes its development to be driven or restricted by policy conditions, but also for many small and medium-sized manufacturers, it is actually difficult for them to directly enter K12 schools. , to a certain extent, it has raised the entry threshold of the industry.

Secondly, as can be seen from the above, within the scope of smart education, many manufacturers have the ability to launch independent products and solutions. However, like other intelligent scene applications, the final project demander, or their needs are many, or they currently do not have the ability to sort out all the needs of education informatization from top to bottom, and the industry has not yet launched a unified Smart campus construction standards, under this situation, if only to meet some local needs step by step, I am afraid that it will eventually return to the old problem of incompatible and difficult interconnection of various subsystems, resulting in data silos.

Finally, perhaps because of the high customization of the smart education project model, the low reproducibility, and the lower-than-expected payment ability of customers, the number of companies that rely solely on smart education revenue to support business growth is not as high as expected, except for companies that are themselves leading companies. Not much, the industry is still in its infancy.

There are still many difficulties. For example, there are not many easy-to-use products on the market, the threshold for using products is high, the product types are chaotic, more players are caught in the channel war and price war, and the education department itself lacks awareness of informatization construction, etc. .

However, if we take a long-term perspective, no one can deny the value that wisdom education can produce in the future.

Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data are bound to be popularized and deeply penetrated into traditional educational scenarios. How to use these technologies and whether they can germinate incredible value in some educational scenarios is all possible.