Online one-to-one teaching in Shanghai
By Li Chen and Song Lu
A four-grade-boy is talking with his teacher through the computer screen. “I also have a secret to tell you, Miss Zhang,” he said, “My mom has passed away two years ago, maybe that’s why my father is so strict about my studies”.
The teacher, who is an undergraduate in Shanghai International Studies University (a famous university in China) as well as a part- time online teacher, on the other side of the screen said, “Well, I think your mother may have become your guardian angel on the heaven”.
The class then extended from Chinese textbook to the life and dream after the swapping of secrets.
After the class, the father of the boy, who called himself Li, had a talk with the teacher, Zhang Xinlei. “I hope you could help me to interact with him” Li said, “I’ve tried many ways to inspire his interest to schoolwork and now I choose online class for him. I hope it will work.”
And the close communication between Zhang and his student is nothing fresh in the Zhangmen one-to-one online teaching school in Shanghai, where the students from well-known institutions and professional teachers from Shanghai’s public schools were preferably recruited as online teachers. There is an increasing number of parents who chose online one-to-one teaching when they want to find a private teacher for their children in recent five years.
The overall trend of online one-to-one teaching pattern was also favorable in China: from 2010 to 2014, the compound growth rate of online teaching (including one-to-to teaching and video teaching) was 19.41%, while by the year of 2017, the rate would rise to 20.20%. And the dominant battlefield would go to online one-to-one teaching, which has go beyond the original middle class to common learners with the burgeoning of new interaction techniques and daily use of video talk among ordinary people, according to the report of Eric research in 2014.
Zhangmen, which means the most professional and respectable in Chinses, is one of the most renowned online schools in Shanghai, said Chen Shuangshuang, the course consultant in the Shanghai headquarter. It altered from the offline one-to-one teaching pattern to the distant teaching in 2015 and expanded the teacher’s team to around 1500 in 1600 with over 34 provinces in China involved. The school is supposed to go public in the next three years, according to Chen.
Zhangmen could satisfy different students, Chen said. In its training class aiming at educating new teachers, an experienced online teacher said, different students had distinct purposes. For example, students who were preparing for the College Entrance Examination wanted to increase their grade while parents of pupils may want their children to have a good habit and arouse their interests in study. So teachers should tailor course materials, which is one advantage of online one-to-one teaching, according to the experienced teacher.
Mr. Han is a full-time teacher in Zhangmen now after resigning from a public primary school. He said that though public school was comparably formal and could bring him a lot of knowledge as a Chinese teacher there, it was hard for teachers to get a promotion. Han said: “If you want to get a high professional title, you have to wait for 10 or even 20 years.” He said in public schools, teachers’ titles were not decided by their abilities and endeavors but their seniorities. While Han said in Zhangmen, he could get a promotion in a short time as long as he worked hard. And the salary was also higher than that in public school.
Han was not sure if online teaching could change the traditional teaching and learning patterns. But he found that some traditional schools, especially in large cities like Shanghai, had already applied online courses in their classes. “I don’t know if this mode will be amplified in the future, but it has already become a popular trend,” Han said.
“The online one-to-one teaching mode has combined the strengths of both traditional class room teaching and Internet classes”, said Hu Yangmin, the manager of Hujiang Internet School in Shanghai, “it largely saves the commuting time and never undermine the interactivity between teacher and students.”
The lack of interactivity of online video class has been attacked by Tencent education report in 2014, according to Tencent’s research, 52% of online video class learners hoped to raise questions to the teachers as they did in the traditional class room and 43% learners wanted to actually talk and communicate with the teachers. On the other hand, an offline teaching class in large cities like Shanghai would usually take longer than 60-minute commuting time with one or two hour’s lessons, let alone the high rental of venues ultimately burdened by the students and parents. The online one-one teaching mode is supposed to provide solutions to both the traditional video class and class room teaching, according to the research.
Mr. Li gave priority to his son’s education. He said he had spent much money on his son’s academic performance to help him form a good habit of studying. However, his endeavor failed. He had problems in communicating with his son. “The online teacher can talk with my son easily. She is also a student and could probably share some things in common with my son,” Li said. “My son seems to listen to the teacher. I hope he could correct his bad habits”.
While the booming of all types of online one-to-one schools also posed some threats. “I didn’t know how to choose the class and teacher at the beginning and was deceived by the one who called themselves ‘the previous university professors’ when I was planning to improve my English,” said Lin Yang, a college school students who has lost 2000 yuan guarantee deposit last year. Up to 2016, there is no official legislations to supervise the online one-to-one schools in Shanghai.
The online education, along with the classroom teaching in commercial institutions, has burgeoned since the release and implementing of the ban on remedial class at the public schools from the year of 2009 in Shanghai by the Ministry of Education aiming at reducing the students workload in China. There has been a considerable amount of commercial remedial classes ranging from primary school lessons, high school lessons to IELES and TOFEL flourishing as the market and need of students didn’t die out with the traditional remedial class in public school.
And the remedial class, being complained but always accompanying the students in China, has become increasingly vital to achieve success to the final College Entrance Examination, the exam which is called “gaokao” in China, determining the fortune and academic career of nearly 10 million students every year in China by whether they could be accepted by a prestigious university.
“As long as the gaokao system remains, the students would have to find some place to take remedial class,” said M.S. Liang, a math teacher in Jianping Middle School in Shanghai, “for the things they learned in school is never enough to deal with the college or high school entrance exam and the competition from their peers”.
M.S. Liang said she has tutored both top students and the students who could narrowly achieved C and the fact is that the good students want to become better and the poor ones could hardly catch up yet both types working harder than before.
The fierce competition has even pushed the parents to restrict the ban of remedial class of the government at the beginning of its release in several Provinces such as Hunan province in 2011. The anxious parents finally resorted to commercial institutions as the policy of Ministry of Education in 2013 has inhibited the teachers from public school to tutor students outside of school time.
“I had spent nearly 100 thousand yuan last year for my son’s high school entrance exam in online one-to-one commercial teaching schools, thanks god he went into an all-right high school,” said Chen Yongsheng, who was again looking for an appropriate high-school online one-to-one tutor for his son, “I believe this kind of teaching mode is effective, yet I missed the days when my elder daughter went into a key university without attending the commercial remedial classes.”
