The education industry is at the crossroads of two major changes.
In recent years, policy adjustments have cooled capital investment. After experiencing a winter of challenges, the education sector has begun to return to “rationality” and focus on high-quality development.
The development of artificial intelligence is transforming the underlying logic of the economy and society in unprecedented ways. Technological evolution and popularization represented by 5G, AR, VR, AIGC, and cloud technology are opening new pathways for intelligent and personalized development in education, bringing new growth points and opportunities to the education industry.
Companies in the midst of industry transformation are also re-evaluating their positioning and strengths. While clarifying their focus, they are concentrating on areas where they can fully leverage their value and find a healthy and sustainable development path.
In its fifth year since its official establishment, Tencent Education has reached an important turning point in its journey—focusing on B-end business. Leveraging cloud + AI + connectivity, it collaborates with industry ecosystem partners to act as a digital assistant in the education sector.
“The country has always regarded the development of education as an important goal. The 20th National Congress report has integrated education, technology, and talent into a comprehensive layout, assigning a higher strategic value to education. When education thrives, the nation thrives; when education is strong, the nation is strong,” said Li Qiang, Vice President of Tencent Group and President of Government and Enterprise Business, on November 22 at the Tencent MEET Education Technology Innovation Summit.
Li Qiang stated: “In the face of a new round of technological and industrial transformation, as well as increasingly fierce international competition, we urgently need to cultivate high-quality talent, achieve technological self-reliance, and accelerate the transition from a major education country to a strong education country. In this process, the integration and innovation of education and technology are crucial.”
Starting Anew, Focusing on B2B
Starting from a new point, Tencent Education is facing a trillion-dollar digital education market.
As a systematic process of educational transformation, the digital transformation of education is not only about utilizing information technology to promote interaction among learners, educators, and managers but also involves updating educational concepts, transforming teaching models, and reconstructing educational systems.
2023 is a year of rapid acceleration for digital transformation in education, welcoming more players to the table, including established educational information companies like Heewo, Honghe, and Jiafa Education, as well as hardware manufacturers such as Huawei, Lenovo, and TCL. Additionally, former giants in the education and training sector like New Oriental, TAL, Yuanfudao, and Zuoyebang are shifting to the digital education track under the “double reduction” policy.
Internet giants have not missed this fast train. Tencent Education has pressed the restart button and begun another self-reconstruction, a natural choice after multiple internal transformations.
The changes can be traced back five years.
On September 30, 2018, Tencent underwent its third major organizational restructuring since its inception, reorganizing from the original seven business groups (BGs) into six, referred to as the “930” reform by the outside world.
One of the newly established business groups is the “Cloud and Smart Industries Group” (CSIG), closely related to the education industry. This marked the first time in Tencent’s 25-year history that a fully B2B business unit was created.
B2B has been elevated to an unprecedented strategic height, with previously scattered B2B businesses under various business groups now unified, providing services to enterprise clients in a more aggregated and efficient manner.
In the case of education, Tencent’s education business had long been in a fragmented state—over 20 educational businesses scattered across six BGs. With the establishment of CSIG, Tencent has conducted a thorough review of its education business for the first time, making “Tencent Education” the unified outlet for Tencent in the entire education field.
The integrated Tencent Education business landscape includes Tencent’s ABCmouse, Tencent Classroom, and other B2C products, as well as Tencent Education’s enterprise cooperation, smart campus, and WeSchool solutions aimed at the B-end, covering the entire process from preschool education to adult education in technology, services, and content.
At that time, Tencent Education’s user base had already exceeded 400 million.
With the implementation of the “double reduction” policy in July 2021, restrictions were placed on extracurricular subject training for compulsory education, reinforcing the notion of school education as the main battleground, which brought more attention to the B2B education market. Companies in the industry responded with significant adjustments.
Rapid development was paused due to external changes, prompting Tencent Education to rethink and adjust its layout—focusing on the B-end.
If keywords were assigned to Tencent’s education business, the previous round of attempts would be represented by a “full bloom” of both C-end and B-end, while the current reform focuses on the B-end.
The logic behind this strategic adjustment is a choice that combines external changes with internal capabilities, as well as a reflection on the entire internet industry.
China’s internet has already passed its mid-point. Media personality Fang Hao summarized in “Big Companies Are All-in in the Second Half” that the core of the second half of the internet is the switch from C to B. C-end traffic is the foundation, while B-end clients are the increment; the first half was a competition for C-end operational ability, while the second half will be a competition for B-end service capability, which is Tencent Education’s greatest advantage in the fragmented yet massive education sector.
Leveraging Tencent’s user and data accumulation and product capabilities, combined with foundational technologies such as big data, AI, and cloud computing, a series of technological products are being launched to assist the digitalization of the education industry. Tencent Cloud Vice President and Head of Tencent Education, Shi Mei, stated: “Our accumulation on the C-end will provide experience and assistance for our market on the B-end.”
Shi Mei, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Head of Tencent Education
Cloud, AI, Connectivity
Unlike the previous emphasis on hardware devices in the 1.0 era of educational informationization, the 2.0 phase aims to promote a deep integration of information technology and teaching.
2022 marked the conclusion of the 2.0 era of educational informationization, with the national education digitalization strategic action about to enter a new development phase, transitioning towards digital transformation. Its core lies in promoting the digital transformation of all elements, businesses, fields, and processes in education.
The biggest challenge in the digitalization of the education industry lies in its dispersed and fragmented data, forming numerous difficult-to-connect “data islands.” Parents, schools, teachers, students, and educational management institutions create a complex decision chain interwoven with educational scenarios and logic, making education digitalization particularly challenging.
Therefore, whether in basic education or higher education, the primary issue to resolve is the “information island,” followed by practical problems in various scenarios that need to be addressed in collaboration with ecosystem partners.
In the field of basic education, in addition to establishing a “data foundation” from the county and district model, Tencent Education also provides decision-making and other data support to educational management institutions through a digital foundation. In 2022, Tencent Education, in collaboration with China East Communication, developed a smart education platform for Guangxi Province, covering 33,000 schools and 230,000 teaching staff in the autonomous region, allowing various users at all levels to collaborate seamlessly within the same organizational structure, making the platform a super connector linking teachers, students, parents, schools, and management.
With the development of underlying technologies and the involvement of ecosystem partners, smart campuses have become even more “intelligent.”
Recently, Tencent Education launched a new smart campus service cloud, based on Tencent Cloud’s underlying cloud technology capabilities, connecting tools such as Tencent Meeting, WeChat Work, Tencent Docs, Mini Programs, LeXiang, and WeCard through Edu Link, while also opening up educational content, applications, and services from ecosystem partners, providing schools and educational management institutions with solutions including educational digital foundations, smart campuses, and hybrid teaching.
Taking Sun Yat-sen University as an example, it has three campuses in Guangzhou, Zhuhai, and Shenzhen, and the physical distribution of its space poses challenges for resource allocation.
Leveraging Tencent’s low-code development capabilities, Tencent Education has categorized previously discrete processes; simultaneously, Tencent’s e-signature has broken the bottleneck of “online submission, offline review”; through WeCard, it has granted online trusted identities to teachers, students, visitors, and alumni, while also addressing various identity verification scenarios such as user consumption and payment, solving the problem of identity disconnection between online and offline.
According to Zhu Yajuan, Product Head of Tencent Education, multiple education bureaus in districts such as Shenzhen Luohu, Xiamen Tong’an, and Tianjin Heping, as well as schools like Tsinghua University Affiliated Primary School, have connected users through WeChat Work, making internal communication within the education system more efficient and parent-school interaction closer.
Zhu Yajuan, Product Head of Tencent Education
Tencent Education has found its suitable leverage point—connection.
“We expect to leverage our connection advantages to allow high-quality educational resources to reach a wider audience. Tencent positions itself as a super connector; today, it’s not just about education; when we look at other industries, Tencent’s value advantage also lies in connection,” said Shi Mei.
In addition to connecting and managing data, connecting with technology is also a challenge and difficulty faced by higher education institutions.
For instance, in the current era of large models, the demand for AI for Science and large model training from university research teams is rapidly increasing, with computational power needs continually expanding. The research infrastructure in universities faces challenges such as limited total resources, insufficient computational power, network performance constraints, and dispersed and diverse data.
Regarding the hot topic of artificial intelligence large models, Tencent Cloud’s HCC high-performance computing cluster, TACO AI acceleration suite, Xingmai high-performance network, and vector database products provide solutions for related research tasks, subject teaching, and application development.
On the basis of computational power, Tencent Education also provides research platforms that can connect various software with large models, supporting research in fields such as new materials, biomedicine, and computer science. Through TEFS (Tencent Cloud Material Multiscale Calculation Simulation Platform), it links a wealth of professional research software like vasp and Pwmat, eliminating the bottleneck of deploying research software.
With the rise of the AIGC wave, Tencent Education is also exploring educational AI and has formed two major directions: AI education and AI-assisted education. The former refers to providing technical support such as AI education training platforms for students in basic and higher education; the latter aims to enhance the quality and efficiency of education through Tencent’s mixed Yuan large model, including supporting educational enterprises in optimizing efficiency in content generation, Q&A assistance, and other processes.
For example, in Guangzhou, designated as an AI education demonstration zone by the Ministry of Education, over 1,500 primary and secondary schools have implemented Tencent Education’s AI teaching platform, covering nearly a million students.
“In the early years, learning programming involved adjusting code letter by letter, and debugging was tedious, with the entire programming environment, algorithms, and data learning being dull,” said Zheng Lei, General Manager of Tencent Interactive Entertainment’s User Platform Department and Head of Tencent Minor Protection. “However, the Tencent Kouding programming platform that children use now lowers the learning threshold significantly through drag-and-drop and examples.”
From the school’s perspective, the introduction of artificial intelligence courses has long faced difficulties due to high investments in AI hardware and demanding lab configurations, causing many schools to hesitate.
Guangzhou’s primary and secondary schools have introduced Tencent Kouding’s virtual simulation laboratory, using 3D simulation technology to abstractly model and simulate hardware like robots, while also supporting assembly. Combined with AI technology for simulation operations, this greatly reduces the maintenance and management costs for teachers regarding hardware teaching aids and lowers the environmental requirements for classrooms, enabling primary and secondary schools to efficiently and cost-effectively conduct artificial intelligence teaching.
In terms of technology application, Tencent Education’s advantage lies in better connecting technology with educational entities.
In Shi Mei’s view, technology needs to bring changes to problems that could not be solved in the past, and the essence of change is to connect resources, connect interactions between people, and connect people with knowledge, making opportunities for exposure to knowledge increasingly equitable.
The connection aimed at the B-end ultimately points to the “ecosystem”—the most important keyword in educational digitalization. A universal ecosystem is the greatest imagination Tencent offers to the education industry.
In the AIGC Era, The Imagination of Education B2B
Education digitalization has become the strategic high ground for educational development.
Since the Ministry of Education released the “Education Informationization 2.0 Plan,” a wave of enthusiasm for promoting educational digitalization and informationization has begun to rise in the education sector. In addition to companies focusing on educational digitalization, internet giants like Tencent are also planning to delve deeper into this field.
Having crossed the stages of digitalization and networking, education digitalization has now entered the stage of intelligence. The new generation of information technology, represented by artificial intelligence, promotes data mining and intelligent service realization in the educational process, ushering in a new era of smart education. Especially with the explosion of large models triggered by ChatGPT, domestic giants are competing in an arms race centered around large models.
“Generative artificial intelligence has already shown a trend toward ecological development; it is no longer just a single chatbot but can closely integrate with operating systems, browsers, and various application software. It can be said that it is closer than any technology to seamless integration with education, and it can even be predicted that in the future, the frequency of teachers using generative artificial intelligence may surpass that of PPT,” said Professor Zhong Baichang from the School of Educational Information Technology at South China Normal University.
In this context, generative artificial intelligence will also form a three-dimensional ecosystem of AI education applications with big data, the Internet of Things, and mixed augmented intelligent technologies, serving most educational application scenarios and bringing comprehensive impacts on educational reform.
Elementary school students are learning about artificial intelligence with Tencent Kouding
With Tencent’s mixed Yuan large model as the underlying support, educational enterprises have assistants at every stage of teaching assessment and evaluation.
For instance, a direct application scenario for large models is copywriting, where teachers can use large models to write various materials; secondly, the ability to generate images from text and vice versa allows teachers to quickly generate the images needed for lesson preparation.
Based on the previously provided educational AI PaaS homework grading capabilities, educational enterprises, in conjunction with the mixed Yuan large model, have significantly improved handwriting recognition and mathematical formula understanding, providing more accurate judgments for homework grading and paper review scenarios.
For educational enterprises, marketing scenarios are also an indispensable part. Now, by analyzing dialogue content through large models, the accuracy rate has reached over 90% within two weeks based on training with five user profile tags, somewhat replacing the effect of manual reporting and greatly improving enterprise efficiency.
Yang Hui, General Manager of Tencent Education Enterprise, believes that when training large models, educational enterprises are most concerned about data security, so we choose to provide them with underlying capabilities, including computational power, networks, and toolchains, allowing them to train exclusive large models based on Tencent’s MaaS services, ultimately serving C-end users.
The core of educational digitalization is to help B-end and G-end improve efficiency through technology and products, which tests To B service capabilities and the ability to connect and communicate data between different products. This “connection” includes not only the integration within the same group product system but also the interconnection between products from different companies. However, after over 20 years of development in China’s educational informationization, the information products from different periods, manufacturers, and design philosophies are intricately intertwined.
“Currently, there are many structural problems in promoting smart campuses, such as the difficulty of reconciling individuality and uniformity, and the complexity and cost of new technologies that generally cannot be borne by primary and secondary schools,” said Yu Shengquan, Executive Director of the Future Education High-Precision Innovation Center at Beijing Normal University and doctoral supervisor.
“The cost that a school can afford for an educational information system is very low; one or two hundred thousand is a significant amount, but the requirements for it are particularly high,” Yu Shengquan stated.
To address this issue, he believes that the core of promoting smart campuses should shift from focusing on platform and resource transformation to focusing on services. “Educational digitalization should not be about the technology itself but rather about innovative educational services that solve practical problems under technological support.” Therefore, the construction of smart educational services is an inevitable transformation of intelligent technology.
Yu Shengquan believes that the competition of large models is a stimulus for the aforementioned structural problems, rather than a complete solution. Only by better combining technology with services can a more complete smart campus ecosystem be built from the starting point of new technologies.
The wave of educational digitalization coincides with Tencent Education’s efforts. Unlike other educational companies, Tencent Education’s entry into the B2B education market still follows the principle of “based on cloud and AI technology, emphasizing connection and ecology.”
Shi Mei, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Head of Tencent Education, stated that Tencent Education is very optimistic about the B2B education market and will continue to adhere to the principle of technology-assisted teaching and nurturing towards the future.
“It is still uncertain how AIGC will change education; the entire industry is exploring and experimenting,” said Shi Mei. “However, we see great opportunities and needs in this uncertainty, such as digital campus construction, university research collaboration, and science education in primary and secondary schools. Tencent Education will maximize the power of the ecosystem to provide services for educational entities together.”