Innovation

The Wise Education Intelligent Cloud Megadata Platform (WEICM) uses the Internet technology to provide standard and high-quality educational contents to primary and middle schools and takes advantage of the big data technology to analyse the process and result of education.

The platform includes two editions of online software and a backstage analysis system.

The Teacher Edition includes teaching materials compiled by education professors and allows teachers to arrange their teaching contents, show slides and other demonstrative materials in the class, conduct in-class quiz, assign homework, and access the analysis report from the backstage analysis system.

The Student Edition allows students to do the in-class quiz, finish their homework after class, and read the additional materials provided by their teachers.

With the three components, the WEICM platform focuses on improving the effect of both the in-class teaching and after-class studying.

In the class, a teacher can quiz the students through the WEICM platform. When the students finish answering the quiz, the backstage analysis system will immediately feedback a report of the quiz to the teacher, which gives the teacher a visualized estimation on what extent the students have acquired the knowledge the teacher just taught in the class. Then the teacher would know what knowledge points they should spend more energy on in the rest of the class.

In the past, after the class, the teacher would have to combine hard questions, normal questions, and easy exercises in the homework to take into account the different levels of students. It was a waste of time for both teachers and students. For teachers, there would be more homework that needs correction. And for students, on the other hand, the good students would still have to waste time finishing the normal or easy exercises, while the normal students would have to spend too much time to complete the hard exercises which are actually not for them. Now, with the WEICM platform, teachers could easily assign personalized exercises to different levels of students, and the platform can do the correction work for most of the exercises and return an analysis report to the teacher. And students only need to finish the exercises that suit their learning level, and it spares their time to do other things they have an interest in.

"It is designed to make the teaching and study process much easier and more efficient, and at the same time, to reduce the teaching and study workload," said Xiaowei Ni, the vice president of Ifdoo education company who takes charge of the design and the marketing of the WEICM platform.

Inspiration

For many years, Xiaowei had been interested in the development of the Internet and big data technology and has been thinking about its usage. "When I think about the usage of the big data technology, I noticed that it can play an active role in education and the health care industry." Xiaowei joined Ifdoo education company in the year 2014, and from then took charge of the design and marketing of the WEICM platform.

"The WEICM platform is only in its first edition," explained Xiaowei. "As time passes by, we'll collect more and more data from the teaching processes of our customers. With the data, we can build models which we'll give teachers the ability to exert perspective interventions with their students in the process of teaching to prevent them from misunderstanding the knowledge." This new platform has been in the small-scale experimental stage for months.

Overall impact

One of the present situations of Chinese education is the geographical imbalance in basic education, which includes from primary school education to high school education. The most qualified educational resources, including best teachers and facilities, are highly concentrated in big cities or developed provinces, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu province. On the other hand, schools in underdeveloped areas are usually hard to attract excellent teachers. In the poorest regions, which are usually mountainous areas, many schools would even have to mainly depend on volunteer teachers.

What's more, teachers in underdeveloped and poor areas often have to teach dozens of and sometimes even hundreds of students at the same time. Such a workload makes it impossible for the teachers to focus on the effects of their teaching.

"By means of modern technology, we can to some extent even out this imbalance," Xiaowei Ni believes, "and we can help the teachers to reduce their workload and improve the results of their teaching."

Now, in the third year of the WEICM platform, Ifdoo has been cooperating with 60 of the prefecture-level city education bureaus (totally 330 in the whole country), and the platform has been adopted by more than 300 schools in those cities, which are mainly in relatively underdeveloped provinces, such as Yunnan, Guangxi, and Shanxi.

Business benefit

Nowadays, the Chinese Ministry of Education and the prefecture-level city education bureaus are trying to reduce the imbalance in education. They spent huge amounts of money on schools in underdeveloped regions and poor areas to build schoolhouses and buy modern teaching facilitates. However, the education effect in those areas remain limited, and the gaps between those areas and developed areas is even growing. The governments realize that no matter how many schools they build and no matter how good the facilities are, they just can't motivate experienced teachers to permanently work there.

Now, the education bureaus are willing to cooperate with high-tech companies to explore a new path. "The government has a huge budget to spend on education, so the government purchase opens a big market for us," said Xiaowei.

According to the financial statement of the first half year of 2016, Ifdoo achieved more than 87 million RMB revenue, and the WEICM platform contributed almost 1/3 of the revenue.

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Social and environmental benefit

The Sustainable Development Goal of the UN proposes to ensure the inclusive and equitable quality of education, and it strongly supports the reduction of persistent disparities.

In China, the imbalance of quality of primary and secondary education between big cities and undeveloped areas is continuing to intensify. It’s because most of the experienced teachers always want to live in developed big cities, where they have a much better living standard.

Under such imbalance, students from the regions where the quality of primary and secondary education is limited have much more difficulty in passing the exam to enter the key universities, further hindering their future career development. In the year 2015, among all the new recruited students of Beijing University (one of the top 2 universities in China), none came from underdeveloped areas. It has become a huge social problem because it causes big distrust in social equity, which is the foundation of a sustainable society. In the long run, it will hinder the sustainable development of the society and the country.

As a high-tech company, Xiaowei believes that they can to some extent contribute to solving this imbalance. Although it’s very hard for the primary and middle schools in underdeveloped areas to attract good teachers, they still can improve their teaching effect by using the WEICM platform. "In the case that we can't change the social situation immediately, through the efforts of enterprises, we provide schools and teachers with excellent tools and teaching resources, so that children in backward areas can at least enjoy the same level of education in the digital resources level and in the advanced educational philosophy level as in developed areas."

Interview

Xiaowei Ni, Vice President