Gaotu Techedu Inc. operates as a technology-driven education company with core expertise in online courses.
The company offers learning services and educational content and digitalized learning products. The company adopts the online live large-class format to deliver its courses, which is the most effective and scalable model to disseminate scarce high-quality teaching resources to aspiring students in China.
The company's education excellence is backed by its teachers and in-house curriculum...
Gaotu Techedu Inc. operates as a technology-driven education company with core expertise in online courses.
The company offers learning services and educational content and digitalized learning products. The company adopts the online live large-class format to deliver its courses, which is the most effective and scalable model to disseminate scarce high-quality teaching resources to aspiring students in China.
The company's education excellence is backed by its teachers and in-house curriculum development expertise. To create an effective and engaging learning environment under the large-class format, the company adopts a dual-teacher system, staffing each class with a leading instructor and multiple well-trained supporting tutors serving smaller groups of students. The company prides itself on its rigorous and systematic teacher selection and coaching process. The company’s instructors consist of full-time instructors, contract instructors, and tutors comprising full-time tutors and contract tutors.
The company develops and tailors its proprietary curriculum specifically to its online live large-class format with the intention of driving students' engagement and academic performance. The company designs its courses in ways to inspire students' genuine interest and in-depth interactions, which in turn foster students' holistic development and thus achieve better learning results.
The company strives to apply the latest technology to improve the mode of teaching delivery, student learning experience and operational efficiency. Big data analytics permeates all dimensions of the company's business, including teaching staff training, course development and evaluation, and sales conversion process, which significantly improves its education quality and student engagement and optimizes its sales and marketing spending on prospective students. The company leverages advancements in artificial intelligence technology and its proprietary operation and efficiency support system to improve the productivity and effectiveness of its instructors and tutors.
Business Offerings
The company targets students of all age groups through its course offerings covering a wide spectrum of topics. The company mainly offer learning services, and educational content and digitalized learning products, the learning services mainly include traditional learning services, non-academic tutoring services, and college student and adult education services. The company is also exploring new opportunities to further enrich its business offerings as it continues to expand its student base. The company develop substantially all of its course contents in-house to provide high quality and effective online education experience for students. The company’s instructors use its standardized curriculum for each course to ensure a seamless and effective learning experience for students of different levels and background.
Learning Services
Traditional Learning Services
The company’s traditional learning services focus on traditional online non-compulsory academic subject tutoring services. The company provides a comprehensive set of course offerings that covers core academic subjects, including mathematics, English, Chinese, physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography, and political science for students to improve specific capabilities and achieve better grades in examinations.
Non-Academic Tutoring Services
The company offers a variety of non-academic tutoring and personal interest courses, including but not limited to chess learning, family relationships and education, humanities, and science courses. These course offerings are constructive in sparking children’s interests and intellectual curiosity, enhancing students’ learning skills and improving their critical thinking abilities. The company is also exploring new opportunities to further optimize and enrich the course products for its non-academic tutoring services as it continues to expand its student base.
College Student and Adult Education Services
Professional Courses: The company's professional courses primarily consist of courses designed for college students and adults preparing for professional qualification exams, including teacher's qualification, Chartered Financial Analyst designation, Certified Public Accountant designation, and others. These courses are designed to equip students with the skills and knowledge-sets required in workplaces to elevate their career prospects. The company's professional courses focus on test-taking techniques designed to help students achieve high scores on the admissions and assessment tests. The company's instructors regularly review the latest examinations to ensure the corresponding course materials are up to date.
Admission Courses: The company offers admission courses for college students and adults. The company’s admission courses are designed to boost students' ability to achieve high scores in admission tests and interviews, including national post-graduate entrance examination, civil service examinations, and others. The company also offers courses to help students to prepare for related admission interviews.
Vocational Courses: The company's vocational courses provide students with practical education to prepare them for jobs in industries with significant growth potential and strong hiring demand. Its vocational courses mainly consist of foreign language courses, IT education courses, career development courses, and others.
Foreign language Courses: The company provides English courses to students who intend to learn or improve their English. English courses have been the company’s primary foreign language courses, in the line with the fact that English is widely recognized as the international language of business and has become an important language for pursuing career development opportunities in mainland China. The company’s English courses are designed to teach and improve a specific area of the language, such as grammar, vocabulary, or spoken English.
Overseas Study Related Services: The company’s consultants help students through the application and admission process for overseas educational institutions and provide useful college, graduate, and career counseling advice to help students make informed decisions. The company also counsel and assist students with the immigration process for overseas studies, such as obtaining visas and other related service. In addition to consulting services, the company also offers courses to help students prepare and pass language exams that are required for study abroad, such as IELTS and TOEFL.
Educational Content and Digitalized Learning Products
Educational Content and Digitalized Learning Products are supplements to learning services, mainly include content products, such as books, and digitalized auxiliary learning tools.
Educational Content
The company has an educational content development team who designs and develops substantially all of its course materials in-house, including course outlines, interactive courseware, practice exercises and lesson notes, to ensure a seamless and effective learning experience for its students. Besides, the company has also published some reference books, which are independent of its courses, such as Chinese dictionary, dictionary of idioms, past exam questions of college entrance examination.
Digitalized Learning Products
The company engages in developing, expanding, and upgrading its education-centric digital products and solutions. The company has launched several digital products and solutions customized for educational scenarios encompassing 'teaching, learning, testing, practicing, and evaluation', including interactive learning apps and other digital solutions for students.
Dual-teacher System
The company has engineered a dual-teacher system, consisted of instructors and professional tutors, to facilitate a disciplined and interactive learning environment. The company pairs its instructors with a group of dedicated tutors who are well trained in the course materials and attend to each student to further improve their engagement and learning effectiveness. For its tutoring courses, the company breaks each large-class into multiple smaller groups, and assign a tutor into each group to closely follow up with each student before, during and after each lesson. Tutors are responsible for addressing students' in-class queries, correcting students' post-class exercises, providing support to students after class, and instilling discipline in the students to attend the classes and learn. The company also trains its tutors to provide emotional support to students to help cope with the challenging aspects of their studies. This system allows large-class students to simultaneously learn from the company's instructors while enjoying personalized tutoring services.
The company has designed a ten step learning methodology for pre-lesson, mid-lesson, and post-lesson learning activities to ensure delivery of consistent teaching quality and enhance an effective learning experience and reinforce knowledge retention for students. The company’s ten step learning methodology provides a holistic learning solution that enhances effective learning experience throughout the entire duration of a student’s learning during the course.
The company's dual-teacher system is critical to its success and have devoted significant resources to maintain instruction and motivate instructors and tutors. This is reflected in the company's selective hiring process, strong emphasis on continued training, and competitive performance-based compensation based on rigorous on-going evaluation.
Instructors
The company is committed to developing and maintaining a team of instructors. The company's instructors' teaching capabilities, experience and proven track record fundamentally differentiate it from its competitors. The company has full-time instructors and contract instructors.
The company primarily seeks qualified instructors who have extensive teaching experience and a strong reputation from other education institutions. The company has adopted a quantitative approach to comprehensively assess candidates nationwide based on a wide set of criteria.
Recruitment
Leveraging its management team's deep experience in the education sector, the company has been able to accurately identify and effectively recruit and retain instructors across its course offerings. The company has a team of highly experienced recruitment personnel to seek qualified instructors across mainland China. The company attracts applicants through various online career platforms and it regularly participates in job fairs. Prospective candidates must go through its rigorous interview process, including resume screening, in-person interviews, and demo courses.
Training and Supervision
All newly-hired instructors are required to undergo standardized training to improve their skills in delivering courses to large-class students in a live format. The company's instructors are required to continue to participate in periodic training programs that focus on education content, teaching skills and techniques, teaching performance in an online setting, and its corporate culture and values.
The company has a quality assurance team that monitors the performance of its instructors for each course and generates analysis reports for the supervisor in the relevant subject area. The company's instructors regularly receive constructive feedback on their courses from their supervisor. The company's quality assurance team evaluates instructors' performance based on an integrated, standardized evaluation system, including presentation skills, teaching process, course content, and reactions to any emergent events. The company provides personalized training programs for each instructor to address particular areas for improvement based on feedback from students and its quality assurance team.
Evaluation and Compensation
The company adopts a comprehensive set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and qualitative factors to evaluate instructor performance, including, among others, student retention, teaching capability, and dedication. The company's instructors' promotion is to a large extent based on these KPIs and qualitative factors. To incentivize its instructors, the company offers competitive performance-based bonuses based on student and parent satisfaction.
Tutors
The company has a team of passionate and well-qualified tutors that are essential to its business. The company has developed methods for hiring, training, and retaining qualified tutors, which include a rigorous recruiting process, periodic training in teaching methods and skills, school culture, and philosophy. The company's tutors provide academic guidance and daily support to students throughout the entire duration of a course. The company has full-time tutors and contract tutors.
The company’s tutors' responsibilities typically include interacting with students frequently to monitor students' learning progress and facilitate an engaging learning environment; responding to students' in-class queries, correcting students' post-class exercises in a timely manner after submission and providing prompt and personalized feedback to students; and cooperating with instructors to improve student satisfaction and student retention.
Recruitment
Leveraging its extensive experience in the private online education sector, the company has been able to effectively recruit and retain tutors across its course offerings. The company primarily seeks tutor candidates from recent graduates of reputable universities in China who have demonstrated proficiency in the relevant subjects, a strong sense of responsibility, as well as good communication skills and learning capabilities. The company holds recruiting events at universities across mainland China to seek for qualified candidates. The company has entered into cooperation arrangements with universities in mainland China, through which it promotes its job offerings to and accept applications from their students. The company also partners with universities in mainland China to provide internship and graduate programs to develop a talent pipeline for its tutor team. In addition, the company attracts outstanding experienced applicants through various online career website and regularly participate in job fairs to hire qualified candidates with one to two years of work experience.
Training
The company provides its newly hired tutors with an orientation program to introduce their work flow and job responsibilities. To ensure its tutors will continue to engage and build relationship with students, the company has developed systematic on-the-job training programs on four specific areas, including training that focuses on its corporate culture and responsibilities of tutors, standardized training for its tutors' work flow, a training program that improves tutors' personal capabilities, and a training program to enhance tutors' management skills. The company's tutors are required to attentively reach out to students at each stage of their learning process based on its standardized work flow provided in its training programs. The company also trains its tutors to identify signs of learning challenges of students and provide emotional support to students to help cope with the challenging aspects of their studies. The company has an on-going review mechanism to assess its tutors' job performance.
Evaluation and Compensation
The company uses various KPIs to measure the performance of its tutors, which include, among others, student retention, exercise completion, and student satisfaction. Students may provide feedback on the quality of the company's tutors anytime. The company's tutors' compensation consists of base salary and performance-based bonuses determined by student retention and class and exercise completion.
Educational Content Development
Educational Content Development Team
In addition to its instructors, the company also has a dedicated team of staff focused on education content development. The company's educational content development team focuses on the following three areas:
Develop the company's proprietary course curriculum and educational content. The company's content development team mainly focuses on developing, updating, and improving its syllabi and course materials to stay abreast of the latest trends in their respective subject areas. For example, the company's course materials for its Certified Public Accountant courses are typically updated to remain with examination syllabus newly released by the Chinese Institution of Certified Public Accountants.
Enhance course materials to cater to the company's live learning setting. The company's content development team works with its instructors to ensure its courses and educational content are delivered in an engaging and effective manner. While its instructors retain control of and flexibility in the way their classes are taught, the company's content development personnel, leveraging experience, and data analytics, recommend to its instructors the best practices in teaching in an online setting.
Design Course Materials: The company delivers hard copies of its course materials to students and provide online course materials. The company's content development team edits the lay-out and presentation of its course materials.
Content Development Process
The company designs and develops substantially all of its course materials in-house, including course outlines, interactive courseware, practice exercises, and lesson notes, to ensure a seamless and effective learning experience for its students. The company maintains a strict process for creating new course materials. Before new course material is officially applied, the drafts, along with the accompanying practice exercises, typically undergo multiple rounds of internal review. The company generally pilots test new courses for up to six to twelve months before they are broadly released. The company regularly updates its course materials to stay abreast of the latest trends in their respective subject areas. The company also develops and updates curricula and course materials tailored for classes of different difficulty levels to address different educational requirements and needs of its students at different levels.
The company offers students pre-class and in-class quizzes and exercises to help them better assess their learning outcomes and identify areas for improvement. The company's tutors monitor student performance in these quizzes and exercises and report to its content development team, who will update its quiz banks and exercises catering to student needs, as well as identify weaknesses in the educational content and make timely adjustments.
Technology and Infrastructure
Technology is the backbone of the company's highly scalable business model. The company's strong technological capabilities enable it to deliver a superior student experience and improve operational efficiency. The company's technology team, coupled with its proprietary artificial intelligence technology and the large volume of data generated from its operations, has continued to identify opportunities for improvements in its technology infrastructure and applications. The company has a technology research and development team of professionals.
Live Broadcasting Technology
Live broadcasting technology development has been the company's main focus. The company's proprietary live broadcasting technology makes it possible for as many as 1,000,000 students to join a live broadcasting class simultaneously, without compromising video quality. The company also utilized AI technology to strengthen the video and audio quality of its live broadcasting. The average delay time is below 300 milliseconds for its PC terminal and mobile apps.
Network Infrastructure
The company has developed a reliable and stable network infrastructure to ensure high availability and a low risk of downtime. The company utilizes third-party cloud service providers in mainland China to host its network infrastructure, renting public servers, and bandwidth. The company back-ups its databases on a daily basis. The company's IT department monitors the performance of its websites, mobile apps, and network infrastructure around the clock to enable it to respond quickly to potential problems.
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence
Big Data
The company gathers and analyzes student data at each stage of their interaction with its platform, including enrolling into its course offerings, attending its live courses, submitting completed exercises, and replaying its recorded courses. The company has built strong data analytics capabilities using algorithms, models, and data analytics tools. The company leverages big data analytics technologies to enhance the accuracy in predicting student behavior, which allows optimize targeted marketing and platform operations, and delivers enhanced student experience. The company intends to forecast the frequency of course bookings, preferences of course topics and learning progress through the data analytics to make appropriate recommendations and streamline its marketing and teaching operations. Furthermore, the company's content development team and sales and marketing force also heavily draw upon its data analytics capability. In this regard, the company uses data analysis to carry out technological innovations in user acquisition and have made progress in various areas, such as optimized distribution of promotional content. The company also cooperates with major advertising media to strengthen its ability to attract its target user group while also ensuring data security. Lastly, the company's data analytic capabilities have also improved its user traffic and the interaction between its teachers and students by enabling technologies related to areas, such as multi-task learning and migration learning.
Artificial Intelligence
With access to a massive amount of data, the company is in a strong position to capitalize on the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The company has applied various artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in multiple areas of its business operations, such as personalized course recommendation, automated question answering, and automated exercise correcting backed by image and text recognition. The company will continue to explore the application of the big data and artificial intelligence technologies in its business operations to improve teaching and learning efficiency. For example, the company will introduce personalized exercise recommendations to students based on each student's performance and provide automated exercise grading backed by voice recognition to allow its tutors to have more time for student interactions, and make higher student-to-tutor ratio possible without sacrificing student experience.
Technology plays a vital role in improving the company's in-class experience. The company's XStream streaming media system and its AirSound echo detection system leverage artificial intelligence to automatically adjust system settings to adapt to different network environments and hardware setups, achieving an optimal effect for in-class multiplayer voicing interaction scenarios. The constant upgrades of the company's educational products have effectively translated into its improved retention rate and provided a solid driver for its long-term, healthy, and sustainable development.
OES System
The company has developed its operation and efficiency support system, or OES system, to provide integrated and automated services to employees during every major aspect of its business operations. The company's OES system is its internal system used by its employees, ranging from instructors, tutors, sales personnel, content development personnel, operations team, and management. The company's OES system empowers its employees with automated workflows, such as scheduling courses, analyzing student exercises, and tracking students' attendance, course completion and retention.
Data Intelligence System
The company has adopted a company-wide best-practice proprietary data intelligence system, which is closely integrated with its business operations. Data intelligence system analyzes data from both the company’s OES and its financial reporting system. With business information readily available through this system, the company is able to timely and better refine its resource allocation, respond to changes in customer behavior patterns, adjust operational details, and set budgetary targets.
Online Platform
Students may enroll in the company's courses, attend live courses, review course materials, and submit completed exercises through its website, personal computer terminals, and mobile apps. The company's online courses are offered through its website and mobile applications in a live streaming format. Students may attend online courses, review course materials, complete pre-class quizzes, watch past online courses, and complete practice exercises and problem sets through these portals.
The company has built a user-friendly interface for students accessing its online classes on its website and provides various interactive features to create an immersive learning experience. Students may raise questions to its instructors in class, interact with other students through live-chat box, and contact its IT team to provide real-time technical support. Instructors may utilize the interactive board to highlight specific text phrases or knowledge points to students. Students may utilize their functions in reviewing course materials and submitting exercises.
Sales and Marketing
Marketing Channels
The company markets its course offerings and enhances brand awareness through content-driven strategies across various online and mobile channels. At the same time, the company also generates sales leads from word-of-mouth referrals by its students. The company's course offerings and satisfactory student experience will continue to contribute word-of-mouth referrals.
Sales Process
The company has formulated an effective and systematic sales conversion standard operating procedure designed to optimize the effectiveness of each step of a prospective student's interaction with its platform, from content creation, content distribution, sales leads acquisition, to paid enrollment conversion and retention. The company's sales efficiency relies on the multistage amplification of each of its sales links. The company closely monitors the conversion of each sales link to measure its sales effectiveness and continually optimize each sales link.
Content Generation and Distribution
The company has a dedicated user growth team who produces highly informative marketing content generally in the format of featured articles and short-form videos on parent-child relationship, book list recommendation, and skill set knowledge. The company's promotional content is generally distributed through major social media platforms in mainland China to access targeted audiences.
Promotional Programs
The sales leads generated by the company's various marketing channels are directed to its sales team. The company's sales team encourage prospective students to sign up for promotional classes offered at a discount or for free. The company devotes significant resources to its trial programs as they have a great contribution to its new paid course enrollments.
The company's lower priced promotional program provides a carefully designed curriculum featuring a series of trial courses throughout a three-to-six-day period. The trial courses follow a similar format and are delivered by the same instructors as its standard courses. The company's instructors devote a significant amount of time in preparing these course materials in advance. The company staffs each class with the same tutors as in its standard courses to assist with students' daily study. The company's lower priced promotional program creates an immersive experience for prospective students to understand the effectiveness of its superior teaching quality and its dual-teacher system.
The tutors attentively promote the company's standard courses to prospective students throughout the lower priced promotional program and continue to follow-up with them after the lower priced promotional program. The company's instructors also promote its paid courses when delivering courses in the lower priced promotional program. Their promotion, combined with prospective students' immersive experience of the company's courses, have served as an effective way to convert sales leads into paid course enrollments.
Data Privacy and Security
The company is committed to protecting its students' personal information and privacy. The company has established and implemented a strict platform-wide policy on data collection, processing, and usage. To ensure the confidentiality and integrity of its data, the company maintains a comprehensive and rigorous data security program. The company anonymizes and encrypts confidential personal information and take other technological measures to ensure the secure processing, transmission, and usage of data. The company has also established stringent internal protocols under which it grants classified access to confidential personal data only to limited employees with strictly defined and layered access authority. The company strictly controls and manages the use of data within its various teams. The company's back-end security system is capable of handling malicious attacks to safeguard the security of its operations and to protect the privacy of its students.
Content Moderation
The company's courses undergo multiple rounds of internal review and pilot testing before being broadly released. The company's tutors and quality assurance team monitor its live courses, chat messages and other content on its platform to ensure that it is able to identify content that may be deemed inappropriate or in violation of laws, regulations and government policies.
Competition
The company faces competition in each topic of its course offerings from other online educational service providers, such as TAL Education Group.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2023, the company had registered 406 domain names relating to its business, 165 software copyrights, 3 literature work copyrights, 18 art work copyright, 60 patents, and 873 trademarks in mainland China.
Research and Development Expenses
In 2023, the company's research and development expenses were RMB462.0 million (US$65.1 million).
History
The company was founded in 2014. It was incorporated in 2014 in the Cayman Islands. The company was formerly known as BaiJiaHuLian Group Holdings Limited and changed its name to GSX Techedu Inc. in 2019 and then to Gaotu Techedu Inc. in 2021.
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