How to Teach a Kid Thousands of Miles Away

State University. Then she hit kind of a rough badge. I don't tell very many people about this part of our lives. I lost my home, I lost my job. Essentially, we lost everything, absolutely everything, to the point where we were sleeping out of our car and so um, we were homeless, and and so I had to do something. I had to do something different about our lives, and I had to do it immediately. Luckily, a job prospect came to her through a Chinese company called v I

P Kid. V I P Kid was an opportunity that I found online through a Facebook group. This company has been a blessing for our family because now we're in our own space. I can pay our rent. It has given me a our life back. Yasha is only one of tens of thousands of American teachers who have quit the profession. Here in the US, it's been called a teacher dropout crisis, brought on by long hours, low pay,

and lack of resources. Meanwhile, v I P Kid is promising its teachers a better alternative, tutoring eager Chinese students from the comfort of their homes, often for higher pay than what they would make in traditional schools. We have over two students now, over twenty thou teachers, and then on the refue of two thousand seventeen would be a five filling v that's v I P Kids. Thirty four year old founder Cindy me she's really into the numbers.

As you'll soon see, her entire teaching philosophy is about how to enhance learning with data. Given all these numbers, we are not representing more than of the top on the learning market, and Cindy says she's only just getting started. We're not interested in beauty a after school tutoring brand, right. We're really interested in is to rethinking of how educational

learning could look like in the next time years. Hi, I'm Brad Stone and I'm Peter Lstrom, and this week on Decrypted will explore the booming online education market in China. We'll see how v I P Kid came to lead the pack and check out the company's claims that it's curriculum is boosting learning outcomes for so many students. Cindy Me startup was just valued at more than a billion dollars and with a new data driven approach to learning, the v I P Kid has said it sites on

changing the very concept of school itself. Education is one of the last major industries to see serious disruption by technology, and many people are still skeptical about bringing tech into the classroom. It's a high stakes experiment for v I P Kid, but the future of a whole group of children on the line. Stay with us. Yes, yes, now, I know h What is it? No up here? Hair here? Hair here? Hair the job? Noah. That's Yash online with one of her students, a five year old boy called

Noah who lives in Beijing. Yasha is eight thousand miles away he from her home in New Jersey. She's up super early in the morning so she can talk with Noah during the afternoon and Beijing. They're using an online video conferencing system where they see each other and use a virtual chalkboard, in this case with images of a young girl pointing to her ears and other parts of her face. When Noah started, he was having a hard

time getting into it. He was only four years old and wouldn't even say hello or imitate what Yasha said. But eight months later he's able to follow along and speak basic phrases. Yasha and Noah usually connect three times a week for classes for twenty five minutes each. Yasha says that after six to twelve months, kids are usually comfortable enough to have basic conversations. While she's teaching, every

part of Noah's progress is being tracked and tagged. V I p Kid is constantly reading the data to suggest adjustments that, according to the company, will help kids like Noah learn faster. There's a tremendous amount of measurement that occurs as a service to the student at the prament. That's Rob Hudder, a managing partner at Learned Capital. It's a Silicon Valley venture capital from that specializes in education

and has put money into Cindy's startup. We essentially provide feedback on how well students are doing, and there's continuous reporting that goes back to parent. It's just like the reporting get at school, but it's more detailed and a heck of a lot more frequent. People like Rob look at the traditional method of teaching, one instructor at the front of a classroom, giving twenty or thirty kids all

the same lesson at exactly the same pace. They think that's not only old fashioned, they think it's kind of crazy. Of course, all kids don't learn at the same speed. Of course, certain kids will respond better to examples with sports or superheroes or historical figures. But is that really better teaching? There are plenty of skeptics. It doesn't help that there have been so many online education services in the past that have failed to deliver on their promises.

The whole thing was completely unrewarding to me. If you like teaching, the joy of that is in being with your students and interacting with them and drawing them out, and so it just doesn't happen online. That's a lane Clift. She's a writer who has taught at universities like Yale Middlebury in the University of Connecticut. Elaine wrote an influential article on the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago, and which she argued forcefully against the idea that online

teaching is somehow better. She also thinks that just as a disservice to the students, I think it's actually very sad. And I have taught in Asia. There's a certain intensity in Asia. I can tell you their parents are driven to have some learn in English. I actually believe that we are we are changing as a species in ways

that we are not even aware of. We do not that you lose a tremendous amount in your terms of whether it's your humanity or your courtesy or your patience or whatever when you don't have to interact with people face to face. Boy, Peter Elane is making a pretty strong statement about the kind of education that V. I. P. Kid is providing. That's it. I kind of some athletictor argument. I would imagine it's hard to learn from somebody who

is literally halfway around the world. Yeah, I'd agree. I can't imagine my kids learning from somebody in a different part of the world, especially full time. Maybe for particular skills like a language skill, but overall education that seems very challenging. It is though a creative solution to this dearth of teachers. I mean, I guess it's probably better than nothing right in China, that's the challenge that they face. They just have a shortage of good English teachers, especially

native English teachers. V r P KID provides the curriculum for classes, but it's on the teacher to make sure that tailor their lessons to a child's interests and aptitude,

and teachers that don't perform get phased out. There are a lot of behavioral avocacy related things we're watching out as well, for example, how good their students are doing in their U Unit assessment scores, their kids using the A class post class videws UH like exercises, how they're doing, how they do quizzes, how the teachers are reviewed that parents. This is the founder, Sindy me Again. We visited her

at the company's headquarters in Beijing. It's inside a former daoas temple in the middle of a quiet Hutong, the traditional neighborhood of narrow alleyways and run down homes. The places overflowing with employees, most of them elbow the elbow at long desks. Cindy's office is often one corner jammed with the sofa and stools. She's dressed casually like pretty much everyone else, in a bright orange T shirt with

a v I P Kid logo. She's an athlete who favored sports like skydiving and bungee jumping, though recently she spent more of her workout time in the company Jim. We offer parents new functions like they can watch the class all the time, and then they can edit a thirty second video and share it on a social network. So it's very easy for parents to monitor the entire

learning process. Another your idea she's implementing. With so many teachers, now, parents rely on a recommendation service, not unlike the review system from Amazon. Parents can browse for teachers more likely to fit their child the standard processes. When they have a sign up to for the program, they then would be recommended by our service team the teachers that would probably most suable for their kids. But now we're also using data analytics and the machine learning to recommend teachers

to those students parents from the system. So not only the service team um themselves, but also the machine and also Finally, the parents. Of course, they can always um if they have the time bross through all the twenty teachers and watch all the videos and find teachers. And we don't want to eliminate their opportunities of choosing right because parents really enjoy that, and most of the time when you're at school, you never get to choose the teacher.

What's more, Robbed the venture investor has helped put together there are a group of professors from places like Stanford and Harvard who are using all the video that v I P Kid is generating for research. They want to figure out how they can refine teaching to make it more effective. Every every month we're genuating additional data of over a hundred TV hello, so it's a lot of data.

That's one hundred trillion bytes, which is approximately the same as streaming one hundred hours of video and standard definition on Netflix. All this data helps reassure Chinese parents that they're making the right choice by signing their children up with v I P Kid. For example, who when Haa, who has an eleven year old son called Ryan, look through many of the tutoring options in Beijing, both online and off, and she finds v I p kids approach

most helpful. I'm especially happy with the curriculum settings because you're always adding things that work for Chinese students. This is an area I'm especially satisfied with. Where does the tiger live? The tiger? And hey, that's Yah teaching Wu's son Ryan. He's been with the program about eighteen months. And the bear bear? To? Where does the bear live? The bear lives in the cave? To where does the bird live? And live? Day next? Can a bear live in a nest? No? The nasal co cuck. It will

fall down, down, It'll fall down. You're right. Remember a lot of Chinese families only have one child, and parents are willing to do whatever it takes to get them the best opportunities. In big cities like Beijing, competition can be intense to get your child enrolled in a tutoring service. Oh what do how are you guys teaing with? I got him to study English because it's something that all the kids are studying, and the kids his age are

all getting classes. When I speak with my friends, many of their children go to elementary school, where if you haven't done external studies, it's hard to keep up. So for a number of reasons, we thought it would be best for him to study it. Let's Noah's mother, Gong Iowa. But because the online education sector is so new, many Chinese parents are having to try out these tutoring services without really knowing how much it can help their kids.

It was the middle of last year. I thought should I get my son to learn a bit of English? And it turned out my classmates daughter was also studying VI I P Kids course. So I asked her how it was and she said it wasn't bad and said her daughter's class videos to me, and I thought she was doing fairly well. So I started and I signed him up. It will take years to know whether the company's prize methodology really works as well as it says

it does. Unlike what you might expect, parents in China have been a bit behind their Asian counterparts and spending on extra classes outside of school. According to data from UBS, about seventy percent of children get tutoring outside of school in places like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, but in China it was only thirty seven percent in two thousand and sixteen, and in just a few years, the Chinese

market will be a whole lot bigger. Oh. Yes, Ubs says that figure will probably climb to fifty percent in five years, and at the same time, the number of kids in the kindergarten to twelfth grade segment will swell to about two million. Overall, the tutoring market in China is supposed to double in five years to about a hundred and sixty billion dollars peter As as with all things related to China, we are talking about some very big numbers, Yes, and Cindia set her sights on conquering

a big part of this booming market. She says she's expecting to have a million students in just a few years. A million students by two other nineteen and tenderly students probably are not that far. I should caution it's not clear how realistic that goal is. But what's true is that v I P Kid is growing incredibly fast. Even the two thousand students Cindy has now is a massive lead from the last time I spoke to her, she

had just fifty students enrolled in December. Plus, Cindy wants to expand the kinds of classes v I P Kid offers. Until now, the company has offered only English language training to Chinese students. There are two things we're thinking. We have now got over two percent students, almost two percent students coming from out of China, so uh, Korea, depend Germany, but we so we're not really launching any countries just yet, but it's definitely a possibility where But I think the

ever Know model is pretty good. They just let it grow and organically and see which market picks up and grows really fast. Right and enough probably too then and UH find it designated a target country to to deploy. Okay, so v I p Kid is thinking globally. They're also thinking way beyond English language classes. Just a few weeks ago, the company added Mandarin classes that will be taught by Chinese teachers. Eventually, Cindy hopes to branch into many more subjects.

So we've launched a higher level great uh curriculum content as you go higher, Um, it's more content, it's more math science. They're not just learning language and aren't right, they're learning math science and all everything. So primarily we're not doing language teaching theoter and teaching, we're doing moreph The online US Elementary School North American Elementary School Experience that's why we really needed North American teachers. Taking online

classes for after school English is one thing. But shifting a child's elementary education to a learn from home model that's a whole new ball game, and it could have ramifications for American schools already dealing with an exodus of teachers. Okay, so far v I P Kids model has been almost as popular with teachers as it has been with students. I am from a small town in South Jersey, Hamilton's or the blueberry capital of the world. This is Jennifer Enders,

another teacher I spoke to recently in New York. I'm sort of adventurous at the same time, even though I still live in my small town. UM, my husband and I have been together forever. He's a full time singer, songwriter, musician, UM producers, so we've just been traveling and traveling. So I never really went into the classroom full time. And UM, I'm always like looking for something flexible. V I P Kids. Flexible hours are a big draw. It's also a good

way for teachers to supplement their incomes. Teaching salaries in the US are notoriously not as high as many would like. Peter, did you find out the name of her husband's band. I did. It's the early November. Should check them out. They're pretty good. You gotta get up. He's been doing it forever and he's still going strong. So um Australia and Europe everywhere. And I started looking for other opportunities, more e s L opportunities, and I found the I P Kid and that was that was it. So I'm

coming up to eighteen months with the company. As v I P Kids signs up more students and more teachers, at a certain point, the rest of the world may need to sit up and take notice. V I P Kid already has two hundred thousand kids enrolled in its program. That's more kids than the Boston or Dallas public school systems, and according to Cindy, teachers are applying to work with v I P Kid in droves. They accept less than

ten percent of the teachers that apply. Importantly, the vast majority of the teachers that Cindy is hiring are based here in the US. Do we have a less than uh ten per cent about teachers from Canada and most primarily mostly in the US from the USA in other parts of the world too, to the UK, teacher, no, not yet, and once they're enrolled, it's up to the

teacher to decide how many hours they work. Many teachers are working with v I P Kid on the side to supplement their income, but others like Jennifer are working full time hours. UM I try to aim for between thirty and forty. I've actually exceeded forty at times during high recruitment period. Some people watching this space think the one on one approach online just doesn't make business sense. Edwin Chen, an analyst at UBS, is one of them.

From company's perspective, it's difficult to scale up because supposedly one teacher colony teach one students at sudden period up time. Edwin covers education companies in China. He thinks that brick and mortar companies like Tal Education have a big advantage over upstarts like v I P Kid. Tal Education when public in the US, and it's stock is more than double this year thanks to surging revenue. When you grow bigger and bigger, one it's difficult to source enough tutors.

Quality tutors and to the teaching quality are very dependent on the individual teachers. Is relatively more difficult to standardize the services you provide to the children. But when I push Cindy and how she feels about moving away from the classroom model of teaching, said she thinks learning online has distinct advantages. I find the in person session uh to be the same when it's face to face like this, and when it's online, so that covers the whole like

in person thing. But then it can be more effective when it's online because teachers can use um ay are argument in reality they would use apps so that when it teach about um hitting, they can have a baseball player, uh like an animated image that is so it sounds very like, it looks very real for the students because otherwise you would have demonstrated right. And then it's very like when they talk about dinosaur, a dinosaur pops up

on the screen. Do you see online learning in the ability to kind of do this online learning as an opportunity to supplement in person learning or do you think there are opportunities to surpass in personal teaching? I think, for for current, for now, it's a supplement of the in person learning for the school like schooling experience, I think, but not necessarily in personal learning because parents are choosing

online learning over um like training center of learning. But then over the long term, if we think about learning reimagined and rethink schools, and then I think there's a great opportunity. This would go beyond anything that we can imagine. Peter Indie stories incredibly inspiring. But you know, we're both parents, and I'm not sure i'd feel personally comfortable making online education the bulk of my kids education. Would would you? With my two kids, I don't think I would either.

I'd be hesitant to send them online for very substantial periods of time. But I would say that parents in China are not making that choice in this case. They're looking for any edge they can to get their kids ahead, to give them good education opportunities, and online is where they need to go to get good English teaching. These are also all for profit companies. I mean, do we need to be dubious of, you know, a company that is oriented towards a profit motive also being responsible for

our children's education. That's a really good question. As we've seen in the States, for profit companies providing education services have run into tons of trouble. Boy a lot of this gold rush mentality here in the education sector in China does It does really remind me of some of the destructive booms and tech here in the States. It does, is you and I are old enough to remember a few of the booms and technology in the past. I remember I used to order dog food from pets dot com.

It was cheaper than this store and they brought it right to my door right Well, but back then the business model was a mess. Now now they've kind of figured that out. But I guess the question is, you know, can these education companies make the business model work? Yes, you're seeing this competition play out in China right now. His parents rushed to find better education alternatives for their kids.

They have dozens of choices online and off. Our vision is to be the best education globally, so we want to really make sure that we're able to build the best learning experiences, efficacy for the students for the future. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always want to know what you think

of this show. Get in touch at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at PLS drum and I'm at brad Stone if you haven't already subscribed to our show wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please leave us a rating interview. This goes a long way to get this show in front of more listeners. Special thanks to David Ramley who helped with reporting for this show. This episode was produced by Pia Gudcary, Liz Smith,

and Magnus Hendrickson. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.