ed tech
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Beijing is building its own ed-tech platform

Private companies can no longer do it, so city government is stepping in.

Schoolchildren working on crafts in school.

Both students and teachers are participating on a voluntary basis.

Photo: Liu Ying/Xinhua via Getty Images

The municipal government of Beijing is rolling out a centralized ed-tech platform for middle schoolers. It aims to meet the still-high demand for academic tutoring after China’s July ban on private tutoring.

The platform has been tested in nine school districts in Beijing but will expand to nine more — covering more than 330,000 students across the entire city — by Jan. 1, 2022. It allows middle school students to access the platform through laptops or smartphones and connect with public school teachers every weekday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

All tutoring activities on this platform will take one of four forms: one-on-one tutoring, live group classes, a Q&A platform that offers automatic replies and human replies and recorded lessons. Some of the features, like the Q&A platform that allows students to upload a photo of an exam question and searches it in an academic database, closely resemble the ed-tech product provided by Chinese companies like Yuanfudao.

Both students and teachers are participating on a voluntary basis. Theoretically, a teacher can be compensated up to 100,000 yuan (about $15,760) in a school year, even though the number isn’t particularly appealing considering how well-paid private tutors were before the ban.

 Zeyi Yang

Zeyi Yang is a former reporter with Protocol | China. Previously, he worked as a reporting fellow for the digital magazine Rest of World, covering the intersection of technology and culture in China and neighboring countries. He has also contributed to the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. In his spare time, Zeyi co-founded a Mandarin podcast that tells LGBTQ stories in China. He has been playing Pokemon for 14 years and has a weird favorite pick.

china ed tech
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