{"id":12649,"date":"2020-04-27T11:31:08","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T15:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/tal-online-education-transformation-in-covid-19\/"},"modified":"2020-04-27T11:31:08","modified_gmt":"2020-04-27T15:31:08","slug":"tal-online-education-transformation-in-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/tal-online-education-transformation-in-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"TAL: Online Education Transformation in Covid 19"},"content":{"rendered":"

TAL: a leading tutorial institution with strong offline network<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

TAL Education Group is a leading K-12 after-school tutoring services provider in China. The acronym \u201cTAL\u201d stands for \u201cTomorrow Advancing Life\u201d, which reflects TAL\u2019s vision to promote top learning opportunities for Chinese students through both high-quality teaching and content, as well as leading edge application of technology in the education experience.<\/p>\n

TAL Education Group offers comprehensive tutoring services to students from pre-school to the twelfth grade through three flexible class formats: small classes, personalized premium services, and online courses.<\/p>\n

TAL also operates www.jzb.com, a leading online education platform in China. TAL achieved US$2.56 billion revenue in FY19, and US$850 million ~ US$872 million (YOY 20~23%) in Q4 FY20 (by Feb. 29, 2020).<\/p>\n

TAL has been actively investing in online education since the early 2010s. By Q3 FY20, online education contributes 18% revenue to TAL, with multiple product offerings across student life cycle.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

However, offline face-to-face education still dominates TAL\u2019s revenue (82%). TAL\u2019s learning center network currently covers over 50 key cities in China. As the Chinese tutorial market is still super fragmented, TAL has tremendous challenges to expand in lower tier cities, which is mostly captured by local tutorial institutions.<\/p>\n

Transformation to online education in Covid 19<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

In order to fight against the Coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan and across China, the China central education bureau announced all national schools and education programs should adopt online education only. This obviously brought tremendous challenge to TAL. If without the Covid 19 lock down, TAL had already signed tens of thousands of students for its winter break tutorial programs. The cancelation of these winter programs means huge repayment to customers and incapability of the TAL brand.<\/p>\n

TAL made an almost immediate decision to fully transform to online education, and to turn this crisis into a branding campaign and a customer acquisition opportunity.<\/p>\n

To C: launch free online education classes<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Chinese national education bureau announced to postpone the spring semester start date for all schools on Jan 27. Besides, the national bureau also requires \u201cstopping school classes but continuing learning.\u201d Almost immediately, all leading K12 education companies donated free online classes and open cloud technology platforms.<\/p>\n

TAL was one of the leaders in this campaign. TAL launched free national live classes. Meanwhile, TAL quickly launched its online education app, utilizing the ClassIn platform which TAL invested in 2017, to move all offline classes to online live classes. TAL prepared its teachers through many training sessions on online live classes, e.g., how to use the app, how to tailor the education material for online classes, etc. TAL offline sales support staff also communicated with parents and students through phone calls and wechat discussions. Thanks to this quick effort, most of current students stayed with TAL and moved to its online classes.<\/p>\n

To B: launch free cloud platform for 3rd<\/sup>-party education institutions<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

TAL announced to form RMB 100 million fund for the Coronavirus initiatives, in which RMB 20 million was donated to the Wuhan city, and RMB 80 million was donated to education programs. The latter has three initiatives: 1) Free live education application platform and technology support to support online classes for all national K12 schools. 2) Online education technology solution for 3rd<\/sup>-party local tutorial institutions. Any private education institutions can use TAL\u2019s online education solution for free until the end of the pandemic. TAL will also provide operation and technology support services for these 3rd<\/sup>-party partners. 3) Xuersi.com and TAL\u2019s hundreds of teachers will provide free live classes and self-education classes to national audiences.<\/p>\n

By March 2020, TAL has accomplished online education service and support for 2 million students from 508 public K12 schools in 32 provinces.<\/p>\n

This ecosystem approach not only delivered terrific brand campaign for TAL, but also acquired new students almost at very low acquisition cost for TAL, especially for K12 students and lower-tier city students who used to be very expensive to acquire. In addition, it also helped TAL to test its education solution product in order to transform from a class provider to a technology solution provider.<\/p>\n

TAL\u2019s competitive advantage in online education<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

During this process, TAL also demonstrated its competitive advantage from its long-term investment in education technology.<\/p>\n