GET 2020｜What will happen to education when new farmers go back to their lands?
By: Getchina Insights
Tags: Farmers, Education Technology, Business Opportunities, Agriculture, Education

“The past seven years have been the golden age of the education industry in China. Although we saw rapid growth, there must be black swans and gray rhinos.” Speaking at the Global Education Technology (GET) Summit held in Beijing on Nov. 23–24, Mei Chujiu, the founder and CEO of the summit organizer JMDedu, stressed that regardless of the pandemic, the learning demands will never change, “education is an industry that is immortal, we can make more efforts for this career.”

Mei Chujiu, founder & CEO of JMDedu

Mei Chujiu mentioned that since the COVID-19 spread across the country, many educational institutions go bankrupt or reorganize because of the suspension of offline learning gatherings. Some of them even have no solutions for parents and students. “The core reason that they are prone to the risks of COVID-19 is that they are who have inhering risks, and the COVID-19 is just the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.” Said Mei.

Spurred by the OMO campaign during the epidemic, the number of Chinese online education users reached 420 million. The number slightly decreased to 380 million as the epidemic was under control and the schools reopened, accounting for 40.5% of the 900 million Chinese netizens.

Wan Yiting, CEO of TAL Group

From the perspective of Wan Yiting, CEO of TAL Group, online education space has been a Blue-Becoming-Red Ocean.

As written in China’s Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, the government has shown great determination and support to develop online education. Plus, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security also has released a document, suggesting a new profession for the online education sector called “online learning partner(在线学习服务师)”.

It is defined as a person who uses digital learning platforms or tools to help identify students’ understanding, inform and improve teachers’ instructional practice, and help students track their learning. “As of now, we’ve recruited more than ten thousand talents in this new profession.” Said Wan Yiting.

Besides, the integration of technology and education has boosted many new trends. Wan Yiting believed regarded that the education industry is under the digital revolution. “Data-driven will become one of the core competitiveness in this space, which is an effective way to realize large-scale teaching following their aptitude .” Wan Yiting highlighted that artificial intelligence technology and 5G technologies would comprehensively enhance user experience and be more like realistic classroom scenarios.

Seeing the continuous development of new infrastructure, Mei Chujiu put forward that “agriculture + education” is an emerging market in China with capitalization above $100 billion. “As manual labor has been replaced by automation, migrant workers have to think about where to go. In my opinion, the best way is to go back to their land and farm for family income, and they are new farmers. Today’s China is an infrastructure powerhouse. On the one hand, everyone everywhere can access new information, and various e-commerce firms have emerged. On the other hand, as the process of storage, logistics, and the cold chain has been continuously improved, shipping foodstuffs long distances is no longer a problem.”

When agriculture and education intersect, Mei considered the opportunities will be embodied in two business forms:

1. Skill-based education and training focusing on new farmers

2. Escalating demand for Children’s education and training from new farmer families

“When new farmers return to their hometowns, their urban life experience will affect their demand for improving the aesthetics and quality of children’s education, which means a large market space out of the metro cities.” Said Mei.

“We must have confidence in ourselves.” Mei Chujiu deemed that China’s education rise in education informatization, public school system, and the after-school system is of considerable reference for most developing and developed countries. “Thus, Chinese education companies should go abroad while resuming normal business operations.”