Text | Dai Haotong
Editor | Peng Xiaoqiu
36氪 was informed that recently, the online education technology company “Fengbian Technology” has completed tens of millions of RMB B+ rounds of financing, and the investor is Bank of China Yuecai. The use of funds will be invested in the optimization of automated teaching technology, product development, and talent recruitment .
Before founding Fengbian Technology Company, the founder Liu Keliang’s earliest entrepreneurial experience started from a university platform for non-profit organizations.
From checking class schedules, lectures, exam arrangements, providing learning content, grading teachers, sharing learning materials, and online courses, as of 2014, this non-profit organization has covered and served more than 5 million Chinese college students.
In 2015, most online education products gave users the feeling of a video website in terms of interface interaction. The teaching form was mainly based on a single teacher’s teaching video recording, and there was not much interaction between teachers and students. Due to the inability to match the attention formation mechanism of the human brain, it is difficult for adults to persist for a long time in the process of listening to lectures.
In order to provide the society with more high-quality educational resources and provide adults with better learning experience and effects, Fengbian Technology, established in 2015, has always focused on providing technical solutions for adult education in the form of interactive teaching. So far, the company has launched a number of products, namely: Panda Academy, Panda Small Class, Fengbian Programming, IDP Personal Development Plan, Python Intelligent Trading, Fengbian MTP Management Course and other online learning products.
First of all, in order to allow white-collar workers in the workplace, college students and other groups to have a better reading experience online, read more books. The team launched the first product – Panda Academy, which mainly provides efficient reading courses in philosophy, art, psychology and other disciplines. The entire school system lasts for 10 months, nearly a year. At that time, 1 million student users participated, covering 10 fields for 10 months, 1 topic per month, and 1 book per week . The user learns through the whole cycle and will read 40 books. At the same time, students review every Saturday and take exams on Sunday. If the credits are low, they will be expelled, and if they fail to pass the attendance, their credits will be deducted.
Panda Academy
After several iterations and upgrades, Liu Keliang revealed that the next-day retention rate of Panda Academy users reached 98% , and the 100-day retention rate exceeded 50%. At that time, this product followed more than 5 million users, which also confirmed that after the traditional paper reading scene was converted to the mobile terminal, a good experience could also be obtained.
The rapid and continuous growth of the number of users of Panda Academy has prompted Fengbian Technology to try to develop the second-generation product – Panda Xiaoke. Before launching this product, Liu Keliang found that the length of a single class is very closely related to the completion rate.
Panda class
Since the reading time of Panda Academy is set to 10 minutes a day, and learning for 10 consecutive months, most users only spend 5-10 minutes to complete the learning. Thinking in another direction, if the amount of learning tasks in the course increases, will the completion rate be affected and then decrease? Liu Keliang wanted to test this idea.
Therefore, Liu Keliang and his team decided to make some adjustments to the learning time and content in the Panda Class. Different from Panda Academy, Panda Small Class is positioned as a knowledge-based learning product. The average cost of each class is between 70-80 yuan, and users need to study for more than 20 minutes a day to complete a class . In the Panda Small Class, Fengbian Technology introduced the interactive behavior between teachers and students in the offline teaching scene into the online classroom for the first time, and found that the attention feedback mechanism and user learning behavior data mechanism generated in this interaction can The entire learning experience of online teaching is greatly improved – adults can also study for 20 minutes in a row.
After the launch of Panda Academy and Panda Small Classes, Fengbian Technology has developed a third online product – Fengbian Programming, a Python programming teaching with automatic teaching as the core. The average learning time of the course is between 45 minutes and 60 minutes. , in a single-class experimental environment, the attendance from attendance to the completion of the class reaches 98%, and the attendance after the completion of the class reaches 99%. In a short period of time, the company brought tens of millions of revenue, and the user retention was as high as 98% the next day, far exceeding the industry average of 10%.
Wind change programming
Liu Keliang revealed that in the past, most of the learning videos were designed from the perspective of teachers teaching, and essentially paid more attention to what knowledge content teachers wanted to express, resulting in passive absorption by students. The course format launched by Fengbian Technology, from the perspective of students, considers which interactive forms can help students better absorb knowledge, user-centered design thinking, and provides students with teaching solutions that can solve practical problems. The change and optimization of the design concept have directly brought about an increase in the number of users and an increase in revenue.
Since then, Fengbian Technology has further optimized the product, and planned the progress and content of each learning for the user according to the learning content, and recommended it to the user through the learning platform every day to play a better reminder role. At the same time, Fengbian Technology has achieved the effect of attracting users to actively learn by building a curriculum system that is interlinked like comic series.
Course Design
In order to achieve this goal, Fengbian Technology gave full play to its core technical advantages and built its own content platform, which has the advantage of being able to grasp and understand user learning data at any time . Based on this, the company will model the collected data that each user chooses to jump out of during the learning process, and use this as the basis for optimizing the interactive content . Liu Keliang told 36Kr that this kind of self-owned closed learning system can bring full data flow to users of all ports in Fengbian Technology.
In addition, Fengbian Technology also cooperates with universities such as South University of Science and Technology in curriculum development. Colleges and universities use the curriculum development system of wind change technology as a tool to fill in the content taught by college teachers on this basis.
Wind Change Technology & South University of Science and Technology Cooperation Case
In the near future, Fengbian Technology will create more high-quality courses in the two directions of ” new life” and “new tools” . In Liu Keliang’s view, “new life” means that in the process of life, a person needs new abilities and knowledge to match the new learning needs brought about by the new identity and the new life stage. And “new tools” means that in the process of civilization development, we need new production tools to solve problems more efficiently, which brings new learning needs. The related multi-disciplinary course content has been in the incubation plan of Wind Change, and in the future, it can provide users with more new ways for personal continuous learning and growth.
In terms of team, there are currently about 600 wind technology personnel, of which there are as many as 200 product R&D personnel , and the ratio of other operation and service positions is close to one to one. In the future, the team will increase staff recruitment efforts.
Regarding this round of financing, Zhou Xiaolin, senior investment manager of BOC Yuecai , the capital, said to 36氪 that, first of all, BOC Yuecai continues to be optimistic about the vocational education track, and lifelong learning in the workplace has become a lifestyle commonly pursued by modern people. Artificial intelligence, big data and other digital Technological breakthroughs have also brought more new growth points to the development of vocational education; secondly, the human-computer interactive teaching mode pioneered by Fengbian Technology not only ensures the user experience, but also reduces the marginal cost of expansion and realizes the unit economic model. Substantially optimized; finally, the company’s advanced middle-office system, we believe that the ideal way to open the Internet is a standardized, modular, and digital internal operation system , and the wind-changing middle-office system fully meets our imagination. Under the broad development prospects of vocational education, the entire team continues to iterate and improve, so that more students can gain and grow.
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