Inside The Chinese Edtech Ecosystem with Andrew Shewbart of ALO7

Asia. As Executive Vice President and Board member of ello seven China's largest digital publisher and b2b content solutions provider and your oversight digital curriculum development and provided English language learning guidance for the entire company and the 10,000 schools that utilized ALO7 products.

Andrew is also the lead consultant for CCTVs educational English programming, and an internationally renowned expert on children's ELL production, teaching theory practical teaching and the use of technology to empower teachers, children and parents in the digital age. Before joining Isla seven Andrew founded and operated William language schools a chain of 17 ell schools in Taiwan seeing new opportunities to help a larger

group of students. He moved to Shanghai joined the Disney English team, where he was the first employee of the Disney English joint venture served as its first language learning learning director and opened the first five Disney Education Learning Centers. He was also a leading creator of Disney English, his scope and sequence, their digital and print content. And he hired the first 100 local and foreign Disney English teaching staff members. Andrew Shewbart, Welcome to EdTech insiders.

and learning Mandarin. And while I was there in order to stay and keep a visa, I was teaching and I found that, wow, it really spoke to me, I was so passionate about teaching kids and just how education can impact families and impact society. And so I shifted into full time teaching when in the year 2000. So three years after I had arrived, I set up my first brick and mortar school. And by the time that I left, I wanted to move to

mainland China. I had 17 schools and a publishing company, which I sold at that time in the year 2008, I was working with the Walt Disney Company to help them write their operating guides, because they wanted to get with the success of you know, Disney magic English and a few of their different curriculums that they offered from Disney consumer Publishing Group, they wanted to get in the offline business. And

they wanted to open schools. And so actually, the first Disney schools, Disney English schools in the entire world were opened in China, when I opened the first five of those. So I wrote the operating guide, I wrote a lot of the content. And what was interesting about that is with my schools in Taiwan, I had written the content from the ground up. So I had a publishing company, I wrote my own books. Whereas with Disney, we had to take existing Disney properties.

And when I say properties, I mean movies or cartoons and things like that, like The Incredibles, or sleeping beauty or Cinderella, and build content around those existing digital elements. And that's really the first time I got into kind of,

quote, unquote, edtech. So I worked with their production team back in Glendale in the US while I was living in Shanghai, to build a scope and sequence, identify those target language items within films, and then have them pull those artifacts or items from the different digital content that we had created and build courseware. We had print materials as well. We also use at the time with this was called Sentio. So they were

clickers in the classroom. So they would be little mini assessments throughout the class. And one cool thing about those is we were teaching kids as young as two years old now we didn't really use this entails at that age, but around the age of four or five, they had these clicking devices And they didn't know their numbers. So if you said ABC or D for the choices, or 123, fours, the choices that may get confused. So we actually

use shapes. So we had circle, X square, and triangle so that they get identified, which I thought was a nice little, little touch to do that. But it was very clunky in the beginning, because you had to pair the machines, make sure they were paired at the right student. And you know, when you've when you're having only a 45 minute class, it ate up a lot of time. But that was kind of my first for real foray into edtech, and building something with the support of the Disney

team. But it was quite fun. And but what I realized this after having open, you know, more than 20 offline schools, I was really only serving high income, high net worth individual medium net worth individuals. And we were physically restricted in terms of we can only teach those students who kind of lived in that area, or were able to

travel to that area. And I thought, why not build the best content and the best platform, and then leverage the network of schools that already exist in China, of which there are millions of schools in China, but just give them the best content and the best platform. And that's why in 2009, we set up Aloe seven, and started building from there. And that journey was interesting as well, because it took us quite a few different business models to figure out what kind of finally

ended up working. Initially, we had, you know, a virtual world that we put on some of these gaming websites that that kids would go to, and they would log in and play on our virtual world, adopt an avatar or things like that, and then play some of our learning games. And then we had a call center, and we'd call the parents and say, Hey, your child's been playing on our website, it's a learning website, if you'd like to have more information about it, we can, you know, give you some

more information. And we had a sell through rate of about, you know, it was freemium. So to upgrade to premium, it was about 1.5%. And at that time, my partner and I thought that was, that was pretty bad. But in reality, I guess that's pretty good. Once I kind of learned more about the freemium premium businesses, we entered the Go business to government and sell

into public schools. But that's such a legacy with Oxford Press, as well, as you know, some of the other larger presses out there, larger publishers out there. And then we settled on b2b. So we still had the virtual world. But in order for the students to, you know, motivate and get onto that we were selling directly into these private language institutes. And that model took off and did great. So we had our core curriculum, we had our authoring tools, we had apps for students,

parents, and teachers. And we could give dashboard views to the principals of the schools to show usage, teachers could look down at a specific cohort, compare their different classes compare students within a class. And then parents got individual tailored reports after every class and when they did their homework. So we really tried to I looked at it as an education, there are four different stakeholders. They're the principals are the owners of a

school. And remember, these are private school, it's not public schools, you have teachers, you have parents, and you have students. And each one of those users or kind of character profiles, wants something different principals, they open those schools because they want to make money. It's a profit driven business. Teachers, they want something that's easy to use, you can give them the best

program in the world. But if there's a large learning curve, they're not going to use it because they want to fall back on what they're used to parents, they want to see results. So you need to make sure that your content is related back to what they're being tested on in public schools, and kind of nationwide, you know, golf calm and don't call like the middle school test on the high school test. And then finally, what do kids want all over the world

doesn't matter. China and America want to have a good time, they just want to have fun. And so we had to satisfy all of those desires or needs from each of those different segments in order to be successful. And I think we did that quite well. So that's how the long story of how I got into the EdTech business and how we made allo seven, the number one digital publisher in China with 15 million registered users.

different models. I think a lot of our Ed Tech Insider listeners will recognize a lot of the interesting things you're saying here the idea of having to satisfy multiple stakeholders who have very different demands the b2b model and the idea of creating courseware and learning platforms that can scale rather than work within, you know, a particular region. And a lot of these things are sort of supercharged in China, the urban rural divide the number of schools, the number of private

schools. It's a really interesting story. You know, one of the things that the superpowers that I think you've gained over over those 15 years building in China, both with Disney and with aloe seven, is the ability to create learning experiences that really resonate with kids and With Chinese kids, Chinese learners specifically.

So you've mentioned a little bit about this, but dive a little deeper into ELA sevens philosophy, of learning of how to reach the kids and how you sort of combined effective education practices, get those outcomes with the fun gaming elements that kids want.

within kids. So, within Aloe sevens, virtual world that I mentioned, students adopt an avatar, these avatars that comes with a very rich backstory, and they came from another planet, and the students needed to help them navigate through our virtual world, the virtual world was based on actual Earth, I saw so many other virtual worlds out there that were based on some fantasy land, when the students they relate to the world around

them. And there are so many interesting things about our own Earth that students can be learning. So they have the opportunity to explore the real world and learn about different countries like Australia, South Africa's Kruger National Park and the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, we felt that our own world was so interesting, and students love to travel around and learn about different cultures and the local environment. It also allowed for rich settings for our learning

games. For example, music games that were set at the Sydney Opera House, we had a very cool Tour de France spelling game, where your cyclist pedals faster, the quicker and more accurately you type. So they have the cultural element there, but they also have the kind of learning game. So in order to play these games, travel or buy items within the virtual world, students needed to spend virtual

currency. And I saw, I still remember my niece, I won't name the app, but her my sister's credit card was paired with the app. And in one game, my niece racked up I think it was like $800 worth of charges on a credit card, without my sister even knowing what was going on. And I think that you're so just not the right thing to do is to trick the parents and, you know, kind of felt that it was kind of cheating the system and trying to you know, ill gotten gains,

basically. And so, in order to play our games, as I mentioned, the students need to spend that virtual currency. However, our currency could not be purchased with money. Like a lot of the apps like I just mentioned, that you see an app stores, rather, it was earned by completing homework assigned by the teachers based on the in class content, that's the only way that that they could earn currency was by accomplishing learning tasks or doing things that the teacher had assigned to

them. This created a strong positive feedback loop where students needed to complete homework, which they would have had to do regardless. So I mean, it was something that they were going to do, but you're incentivizing them to do here, in order to fully participate in the virtual world. Another approach that I'm a huge fan of is content based learning. I feel that rote learning is not very effective at meaningful language acquisition. Students lack a context when learning

through that rote method. So the language feels forced, and there's no emotional pool. That was one good thing about Disney and something that I learned was students really care about the characters. So if you write good stories, you're going to have successful students by providing a context or a background story.

It makes sense to the students as they negotiate the meaning of learning targets within themselves as they make sense of a language and then also externally as they negotiate meaning with other students when they communicate in that second language. Another concept that Allah seven did very well was a parallel set of readers that accompanied the main curriculum. Most reader programs, like magic Treehouse, which is great, their

content is excellent. They're standalone, they're kind of like a bolt on and they have no relationship with the no meaningful relationship with the target language of the core curriculum that's being taught as an ESL or EFL program. The students have a main textbook and the readers don't match the content with regards to language, tents or even ability

level. We developed our reader program in unison with our core curriculum so the students reviewing previously introduced to tenses and language targets. Another fun aspect of the our reader series was that they were written quote unquote, by the avatars who the students had

adopted. This was done to instill in the students a sense that if their avatars can create these stories, the students could as well later on and the aloe seven curriculum as they grew, students had creative writing assignments in which they had to create their own stories. And after seeing that their quote unquote friends had done this before, I think that task became less daunting, but

much more enjoyable. So I always looked at it as you know, build good content but make it easy to use in your gonna satisfy those two big user groups, the teachers who are going to, you know, they have to, you have to have their buy in, but then also the students to make them, you know, really interested in it. So that's basically my philosophy and, and that's what led kind of the aloe seven production team and the curriculum development team. That's a

learning. If you look at, you know, the PISA scores, the last Pisa, OECD PISA exam in 2018, you see the, you know, the Chinese regions, you know, Beijing and Shanghai, their urban regions, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, who they put them all together, as the number one in the world in almost every subject. And you know, Macau and Hong Kong get incredibly high scores, girls tend to score higher and reading boys in math

and science. And I think, sometimes people in the US, we look at Chinese education and think, oh, yeah, you know, they're getting great scores, because it's super intensive, it's rote learning, they're totally differential for teachers, they just do all their homework, they do everything they're told to do. And then they get way, way ahead. But there's not that much joy and creativity. And it's such a different picture than what you're what you're outlining

right here. So, are these stereotypes, you know, rooted in reality? Or are they totally wrong? Or Are there aspects of you know, different elements of the Chinese education systems that have very different, you know, outcomes?

think was it was a problem. So I don't think that students got necessarily fluent or, you know, a good ability in their public school classes, they did learn what was going to be tested, when teaching to the test, and just trying to make sure that those test scores were were kept, I guess, up to the level up to the standard that they wanted to. However, what you do see in those urban areas are, you know, they're inundated with private language schools.

There's new oriental THL among others of the 11 publicly listed at the time learning education companies, and within China, some listed here in the States, I'm listed in Hong Kong. So I'm listed in China, 10 of them were my clients. And so I think the majority of parents were sending their students or started sending their children to these

after school programs. And so I think it was a combination of what they saw in the public school, and then what they saw after a school that allowed him to have such good test results, with regard to what we see, I find that a lot of people have the perception that Chinese people are great at math, that's

not always the case. You know, it's just like in America, we have people who are good at math, we have people who are not good at math, I just think that the subset of people who come over to the United States to study generally settled in the

hard science fields. And so when you see that cut of society, then you're naturally going to make that assumption that Oh, I guess all Chinese people are good at math, where you're just only viewing a specific subset of society that has been that has come over here to be educated, we're in any type of Western setting, you know, there's definitely a lot more that are studying engineering, hard sciences, as opposed to, you know, art or, you know, liberal arts or something like

that. And so So I think it's a combination of a few different things. It's the public school mindset versus the private school. And the uptake on that, I think, depends on the different city as you go to. But within Shanghai, about 25%, or 26%, of household disposable income was spent on education for their children, and that's

outside of the public school. So that's going to math class that's going to music class that's going to English classes, and going to even composition, writing to learn how to write Chinese composition, that's huge. I have no idea what the spending is per American household. But 25% is a lot of

money. And so I think that's where we're seeing that because they really value education, and they really respect teachers, which I found to be, you know, made my career choice that much more rewarding was you had the support of the families believing that, you know, hey, education, I want to give my child the best education possible.

education. And that disposable income education is going to different types of solutions, language schools, like the new Orientals, a T ELLs, you know, math academies, various things. And some of those really, I'm sure they're competitive with each other. So they're really looking to do something that has the outcomes that parents are looking for, and the fun and interest that the kids are looking for, as you mentioned earlier, it's a, it's a really, you know, complex ecosystem.

demos. And at the end of the day, the parents, they wanted to see that what their child was unable to do at the beginning of the class they were able to do at the end of the class, and then they would turn and ask their kid every time they'd say, Did you have fun today? Do you want to go to this class? And so it really was a family decision, you know, it was the mother or father or sometimes even grandparents taking them to

these demo classes. And then the kids saying, Yeah, I want to sign up, this is where I want to be. So you really did have to balance that learning outcomes with engagement? For sure. Yeah, it's

schools. And one of the criticisms of the PISA scores we mentioned is that they look disproportionately at the urban students and the urban students might be significantly outperforming the rural students because they have more expendable income to spend on these private schools. They're in, you know, much higher density areas. I'm curious what your experience was in China.

And what you sort of saw in terms of the difference between Chinese urban schooling like the Shanghai and Beijing and the rural schools, that that may have had really different structures? Sure,

into China. You know, since we were b2b, we didn't serve as many rural areas, but I have been to 30 of the 34, provincial level, administrative regions, and the four that I didn't visit with the lowest GDP ones in the entire country, there was simply no demand there. Either the parents didn't want it, or they're just physically didn't exist, those schools that we go and do business with, we did have some initiatives where students had their virtual

currency. And we would have a simulated vote where they would vote with their virtual currency. And we would support projects like donating glasses to migrant workers, children. But even like, everyday, when you go to public school, you basically spend the entire day there. So there would be like sanitation kits in terms of like washcloths and things after they have lunch at school. So we did have some initiatives like that, but I never felt that we did

enough in that area. And that's one of my biggest regrets is that we weren't able to kind of lift all boats with our efforts, I think given more time, and then with maybe not, some of the changes that came into came into play later, namely COVID and the double reduction policy, then we probably would have been on track to do more in those areas. But you know, even given that, with China's size and its growth, I still was able to visit and gave speeches and attended conferences in more

than 150 cities. And these are 150 cities with over a million people in population. I mean, the scale of Chinese cities, I think that you've never heard not you but the people have never heard of will astound people,

just massive. It's really interesting to hear about your about your travels, and and it makes sense. I mean, for a country that big, where there is so much urbanization, you know, the rural areas, I hate to say you know, I mean obviously nobody wants anybody to be left behind and I can imagine your you mentioned your regret about not being able to do more for

them. But it's also you know, The difference, you know, there's no infrastructure there, maybe not not enough teachers, there's long distances between places, there's so much, you know, so many obstacles to that. So even for somebody who's you know, scale minded ed tech minded like yourself, where you're making a platform that's used by all of these distribution channels, it still can reach the farmer oil policy in the rural areas, it's really interesting to hear you

mentioned COVID. And the double reduction policy and our listeners might, might be very familiar with the double reduction policy may not be that familiar. So let's just do a quick overview because Chinese edtech has been through quite the wringer over the last year and a half, frequent listeners to the podcast, we'll recognize that over the last year and a half, almost every story about China has been about this double reduction policy. It's not always named that but it's these

regulations. It's not always referred to as that these regulations that the Chinese government put out on the EdTech industry, which are totally draconian, I mean, they just are designed to shut down the industry. Everything has to go through state regulators. There's no foreign teachers allowed the it's just like designed to shut down the industry. Literally. You've been right in the middle of this, you've been in China for this entire time. Tell us about what it's been like to be in China

during the during COVID? And then the double reduction policy, what is it what has been the effect on the ad tech market.

policy. But in reality, people weren't having a second child or a third child. And if you go back to my previous part of the conversation, when I said people are spending 25% of their disposable income on one child, what happens when you have to That's what 50% of your disposable income now, you know, that's not enough money to go around. And so the government looked at, well, what are the parents? Why aren't they having children? And the biggest reason people came up with was, it's

too expensive to have kids. And in order to I guess, ameliorate that or assuage the senior like fix the situation. They said, well, let's get rid of the private education schools. And that's a big expense that's going to come off the top for parents. Right. So this also ties back into that rural versus urban question as well. They didn't want, they wanted to level the playing field between the haves and the have nots, because obviously, the GDP in the rural versus the urban area

is significantly different. So it was kind of a double rationale there. One is we want people to have more children. But we also want to level the playing field between the haves and the have nots. But the effect, as can be predicted, probably is almost total devastation of the private K 12 Market, which means my clients were going belly up or closing schools at an alarming rate with

COVID. First and the double reduction policy, it really was a one two punch by in 2020, by actually in November of 2019, was giving a speech in Wuhan, and then flew back to Shanghai. And there started to be some rumbling about, hey, there's some you know, something going on some respiratory issues. And then you remember March of 2020. That was when things went crazy. But it was already popping off in China at that time, but I was in Wuhan, right when it was

happening. So in 2020, most schools were not allowed to have in person classes for the majority of the year, which did help the online teaching business and services such as zoom to take off, but it effectively killed private brick and mortar who had to pay rent. They had to make payroll every

month. And you know, although they do take a prepayment for the courses that they haven't delivered, that cash dries up a lot if you're not accruing clap courses attended over that period of time when you still have fixed expenses every month, when COVID restrictions were eased, the government introduced the double reduction policy, which was loosely enforced at the beginning, but was fully

rolled out in 2021. There was a lot of confusion from the time the policy was released, schools were unclear and local governments had different levels of application. Some cities it was, hey, you know, you're fine. You're still in compliance with the regulations, whereas other cities, they would just come and say, you're no longer allowed to teach and we're taking your

license away, basically. So some cities that had no enforcement business as usual prior to COVID while the other cities had government workers common just close their operations, you know, and they weren't allowed to do anything. Now schools cannot run or even attained by obtain licenses for language

schools. There are still some that operate but under a different license, teaching something else Other than English, ie sports or music, something like roller skating, where the medium of communication, the language of instruction is English. So the students are still getting some English input, but the subject that they're teaching is not the language itself. But so it really did a number on the education industry, throughout

China. I mean, you've seen TL, the share price, their market value has plummeted, along with new oriental along with pretty much every other one that even was lucky enough to stay at stay alive during those two phenomenon that that took place.

be acquired. And, you know, for all the venture capital that had been going into China at a larger and larger rate, for the last few years, that one regulation sort of does it because that's what people invest in, when they're venture capitalists. They want some to either be acquired or IPO. And when it's not allowed by law. Well, there's no point in investing. So the VC dried up

immediately. But it's really interesting to hear that on the ground, it sort of came in these phases that you first knock out all these physical businesses because of COVID. And people are stuck at home are not able to make their way around. And then the online businesses and all the English language businesses, all the foreign businesses, you know, different kinds of

curriculum are all wiped out. So I mean, I would just want to throw out some of the stats around this, you know, these really well, but just for our listeners, you know, up to a million people were laid off between all of these different companies, some of which were very large, laying off workers.

As you know, companies like new oriental and THL, were laying off half of their workforce, which was, I think, 100,000 people at times, all at once and then cutting the salaries all the rest of them, because there was just the whole businesses disappeared, they estimate $100 billion wiped off of the education market cap all at once. That's a class central

estimate. We say at least 25 online tutoring companies going bankrupt in 2021, just as this was starting, or I guess, you you mentioned 2021 is when it really went into effect. And the entire industry has really

collapsed. And, you know, something that I think is close to the hearts of our listeners, hold on IQ is, you know, global and tech intelligence platform, they track all the Ed Tech unicorns and very recently, they just had to sort of shrug their shoulders and admit and they took all of the Chinese companies basically off of their unicorns list they said these are not worth over a billion dollars anymore, even though they were doing incredibly well.

They took 11 companies off including VIP kid, VIP kid I think they've kid no box yuanfu Tao is your your bang, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing this, and pretty much every company there. This was just a total decimation of the industry. And I'd love for you, you were you've been sort of there this whole time to take us a little like travel back. You've done a little bit of this already. But like before, COVID before double reduction. You know, these

companies were enormous. I mean, they had so many learning centers, so many learners give us a little bit of a view of what it looked like in China when the ad tech ecosystem was booming and when venture was booming, in 2019

up that business. So I mean, I know these people on a first name basis, so it was a heady times we had a lot of fun. In 2019, hallo seven specifically, we had 15 million registered users of our platform. Now, a lot of those came through the b2c platform, you know, being on aggregate sites, the 1.5% sell through that I said, but I think more impressively, we deliver more than 30,000 online classes per week to around 100,000 students. I mean, that's huge.

In terms of total number of students and total number of teachers, you need to have to deliver those classes. We work with more than 10,000 schools and organizations. Our revenue itself was over 35 million US dollars. We secured funding of more than 65 million with a post money valuation of close to 240 million. So that's a quarter of a billion dollars that the company was worth when, when we

were, you know, flying high. As for myself, I worked six, seven days a week, but I was happy to do it because we were just doing something that was so cool. I usually I only spend about two days of the week in our head headquarters in Shanghai and the remainder of my week was spent criss crossing China giving speeches to principals, teachers and parents and hosting conferences. Meeting with

investors. alow seven ourselves, we held an annual edtech conference every single year that was attended by more than 3000 people each time. Some of our keynote speakers included Leonard Kleinrock, who was one of our investors as well as Nicholas Negroponte of MIT

Media. And even Michael, you, the new oriental CEO, along with other education, digital and investment, luminaries, I was interviewed multiple times, once by CNBC, I would regularly pitch to potential investors at conferences that were hosted by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. I mean, Ed Tech was a darling and it was a star at the time, it was a booming time, it was really competitive. But that

made you sharp. And that's why I didn't mind working those six to seven days a week, because this was my baby, you know, the curriculum that I built along with my team, the company that I set up, and that I built to see it grow, I didn't want to lose our edge. And so it was Go, go

go. In 2019, we had 550 full time employees, the majority of whom were engineers, we had more than 6000, part time teachers around the globe, mainly the US and Canada, but around the globe, delivering synchronous classes to our students, which was different from what companies like VIP kid they did. So our model was, the students would attend an offline class delivered by a Chinese teacher, or a foreign teacher, but generally, it was Chinese

teachers. And then in the same cohort of students, but broken down into 123, they would have online classes that was concurrent or coincided with the content that they saw in their offline class, which is a different model from VIP kid, which was more like Uber, it was on demand, like I want to have a class now, every time you're probably going to have a different teacher, the content wasn't related necessarily to what they were learning in their offline classes. I'm not saying

that that's wrong. I mean, I think exposure to any language is great. It was just a different system. I don't have we did and that was also b2b. So we would sell that service into our schools. So yeah, it was fun. It was interesting, I learned so much. And I think we did things in edtech. That why In fact, I know we did, that aren't being done anywhere else in the world. So it was just really, really inspiring to be

part of that. And to see how many people we were able to help not only the students, but also the families of those students. And even, you know, I don't mean to be too grandiose, but even society as a whole, because I think education has the benefit that it's not only teaching that one student, but if you're teaching them properly, they're going to take your learnings out into society and hopefully improve that for the better.

I think, frankly, to see something that has gotten that big and it's serving so many students just suddenly the rug just completely get pulled out. It's just it's hard to even get your head around. You've mentioned that, you know, Allah seven worked closely with some of the really large Chinese public ed texts like new oriental and oriental ran 1000s, maybe even 10s of to huge numbers of in person schools all over China. So tell us about that partnership with new

Oriental. You mentioned the idea of sort of distribution through these massive private school creators. And what do you see now the new Oriental? After the COVID double reduction, one two punch, what do you see as the future for companies like new oriental, which were once enormous?

all in our database. With metallics, we developed a database of more than 1 million questions and you know, millions of digital assets that are attached to each of these questions. So this allowed Aloe seven to create bespoke curricula in addition to our core curriculum, for institutions that wanted to use their own content, for example of a school really liked our platform, but had a legacy curriculum that they wanted to

continue to use. We could use optical character recognition, pull out all of those learning targets, and our database would could pull from that. And we could do an almost instantaneous digital wrap for any whether it was a reader whether it was a textbook, whether it was a workbook, whatever. And so that would populate the homework set of all of our related questions that were pulled from that

database. This saved one of my departments, but my curriculum development team, countless man hours when in an organization did not want to change curricula. Were wanted more of a modern digital rap for their legacy books, these digital assets could populate courseware homework, and even the end game learning apps that the students engaged with in our virtual

world. So to new Orientals point and why I wanted to go into that is new oriental had so many schools, but they were mainly not managed by the headquarters, except with regards to finances. So all the payments went to the central organization, but each independent school or even region had its own decision makers on the what products that they wanted to use, and because they knew the population better, you know, in Chong Ching, they wanted online courses in let's say, for example, Chandu, maybe

they didn't want that. So I had to that was my job was to go out and say, let me open my toolkit, here are all the tools that we have, which one would you like to use. And so that's how we worked together with new Oriental. So each city or province had a decision maker and my task and working with them was to show them what we offered, many chose our standard curriculum like Chong Ching. Others just wanted that digital rap that I talked about for the content that they were already

using. And many wanted the parallel online teaching component that we offered, regardless of which content whether it was their own homegrown content, or an off the shelf product, or our own developed product. So as for their future, I worked mainly with their children's education. So it was pop English was the kids brand for new oriental has for their future. I mean, they still have a tight hold on the adult test prep market, which is what they launched with decades

ago. So I don't know that they will go away. But if there's not some type of a change, or alteration to the current double reduction policy, I don't know that we will ever see a large scale children's ELL group returning to its previous glory, or valuation, there are still small players that are out there. But with that policy in place, and I'm not saying that

it's bad or good, or whatever. I mean, everyone has the reasons every government has the right to make their own decisions and do what's best for their population. But without the, I guess, taking away that policy, I don't see how the children's ELL market will go back to its former self prior to the you know, even COVID or the double reduction policy.

really innovative ideas. And I mean, I recognize when you're talking about your model versus the on demand, you know, VIP kid model, some of the exact debates we're having right now with high dosage tutoring in the US and how to make it most effective, whether it should be on demand or scheduled or, or you mentioned, you know, core curriculum versus supplementals.

And how can they get work together, there's so many problems or, you know, issues that you were looking to solve, and you did solve in China that we face in the US that is faced in Europe, they're faced in Africa. And this might be a silly way to phrase this. But I remember, you know, for years, people would talk about the Chinese as always, leapfrogging they would sort of take technology from around the world and then grab it and then jump

past it. And it would go right to mobile phones, or they go right to, to all sorts of new ideas. And it strikes me as maybe there's like a reversal here, where with the implosion of this Chinese K 12 ecosystem, maybe some of these ideas about how to scale enormously might be relevant for India, perhaps which is opening many, many in person learning centers, or the US with our tutoring problem. I'd love to hear you just riff

on that. What types of ideas from your experience or from what you saw in China might be useful all over the world? Well,

whistles and things. But how students complete their homework now that we have AI and more and I think more importantly, and more useful is probably machine learning that wants these questions like we did it Allah seven, once they're tagged with the specific skill, reading, listening, speaking, writing, along with the hard target along with the tense as the child struggles with homework in the past, it's been you got that question wrong, do that question

again. And that's not a strategy for success at learning anything, language or not. And what you can do is test from, I guess, different angles, or you can insert their problem things into a game, which is what we did at ILO seven, and so they don't even know that Oh, You got this wrong, it's more about Okay, moving on to the next question. And then you give them a different look the next time. So that works with students who are not necessarily on target or

on goal. Another one for students who are mastering content with relative ease, they can unlock more difficult content, or even help as a mentor or a guide within that virtual world. This was a trick I used to use in my offline classes. If I had a child who has a behavior problem, a lot of times it was because they were

bored. And I would allow them to come up to the front and kind of be my, you know, associate teacher at the front of the classroom and allow them to keep score on the scoreboard or be the one to pick out the students to who was going to be asked the next question. It's all about figuring out what motivates the child and motivates the learner.

But I think that falls on us as curriculum developers, content designers and tech pioneers, the kids aren't wrong, it's we didn't do a good enough job of developing our content or product or or kind of user

experience for that. The other piece, I think that it's allowing the students to gain a sense of achievement and earning, like additional awards, you can't look at pure games as the dessert, you know, quote, unquote, dessert after you have finished eating your hard target, quote, unquote, vegetables, I think that's a horrible approach. It's not you

answered this, right. So I'm gonna let you play half an hour on your iPad, that's designers being lazy, you should develop something that is a game that's fun for kids, and also stays on target the games themselves and how learners interact with the content should be meaningful. myself, for my company, I developed a five star rating

system. And I used it when working with our product team as they created our different Mini Apps within the virtual world, a race car game that only had background sound effects, that was, you know, speed up, go faster. Hold on, you know, I didn't look at that as having any value at all. For education, I was very passive, that got a one star, it was all passive

input. And the students had didn't have to react to anything that was going on within the game to produce a positive result, our photography game where students were given an audio prompt in English and had to take a picture of that specific object, I counted that as a four star game. That meant if they're in the Brazilian rainforest, and I say, you know, take a picture of a grey monkey, and there'd be all these monkeys all over, but there'd only be one gray when they had to take

that. Well, that's showing me that you comprehended meaningfully the input, and then you were able to complete a task based on that input that I gave you. And by personalizing, as I mentioned before, by inserting the content that they're having problems with, that's a different way to reinforce that

issue. And whether you have a preview page or something like that, that was something that I felt would be, you know, a four star and pretty good representation of how we should be making learning games, we had restaurant games, that would have virtual customers come in

and make an order. And the students had to complete that order that was also forced our game they came in, they told you they wanted something, if you were able to successfully give them what they asked for, then that's completing a task based on some meaningful input, I consider that a four star game, a five star game, in my rubric would be one in which the students create the input themselves. And the game changes based on this input, like you would see in a Choose Your Own

Adventure book. And I think that's the most meaningful type of learning application that you can make is it's dependent on the student's input as opposed to the instructor or the program driving it themselves.

comes with gaming mechanics. And I think one thing that's so exciting right now is that that five star game you mentioned about, you know, a student creates an input and the game changes is suddenly extremely easy to imagine, when you have a world with these incredible generative AI tools. That kid can say, You know what I like rhinoceroses, and it goes great.

Let's do an activity where an officer says, and you can just do it right then that's very easy to imagine in a world of mid journey and Dolly because they can do it. It can make up any animal, any person, any anything. It's really exciting moment, I think you probably agree. We always end the podcast with a question about, you know, what is a resource? And you can, you know, do you can respond to

that as well. But what is a resource, it can be a book, a blog, any kind of resource that you would recommend for somebody who wants to learn more about anything we discussed today, which is a wide gamut of ideas.

what's going on with you? And he said, I'm trying to figure out how to make sure people Well don't use chat AI to make their dissertations and to do their homework for them when we have issues and he goes, I have no idea how to solve this problem. And so it was just, it was amazing to hear somebody who has been in the education industry for, you know, 3040 years I level education, industry, or guy industry, academia to be. So that's his top of mind. And the

reality is, it just came out. So it's gonna be a lot of ethical and administrative and interesting quandary is, I think that we're going to have that we're going to be crossing in the very, very near future. So having said that, books become outdated as soon as they are published, you know, unless you're reading about World War Two or something like that. You're talking about what's

going to work in the future. I think blogs or news aggregators, or something like that are much more beneficial because they, you know, they really have the pulse of current day. One that I really like, is GSV into K. Edu.

It's a great source of up to date news on Ed Tech, there were a number of China's centric blogs prior to the double reduction policy, like get China insights, but they haven't been publishing, you know, I went and look they haven't published I think, since May of last year or even earlier than that, although it is interesting to kind of reminisce and go down memory lane and see what we were doing way back when and what the topics were during that time. So it's a nice snapshot of what was

going on then. But in terms of China's specific blogs with Ed Tech, I think wants the money left. And once the company has dried up, there was obviously less of a demand for those. So if somebody is looking for some up to date information, and I am sure that you are well aware of GSV into K edu, it's my go to I'm a subscribe to their mailer. And if you want to learn anything else, or are interested in contacting me, feel free to reach out to me, I'm on LinkedIn, Andrew Schubert, you

can look at my profile. And feel free to ask me any questions regarding you know, where we're going and where we went, and what I think would be beneficial to EdTech going forward based on my 25 years of experience in China. And

suggestion. Andrew Schubert this has been really interesting, and really a very unique conversation for this podcast. We have never talked about the Chinese tech system in any detail. And I feel like I have a very different understanding of this idea of world exploration and creativity and joy and personalization. It's just such a lovely, and, you know, optimistic way to see education in one of the largest societies

in the world. Let's all hope that you know, things progress in terms of Ed Tech, I hope that that opens up again, and they rethink a little bit about the DRP. But until then we'll I'll have to just wait and see. But it's been great to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for being here and Andrew Schubert on LinkedIn. Talk to you soon. Thanks so much for being here. Absolutely. It