A giant classroom on the go

Xia Peng's dream is to use the best materials and simplest methods to help the Chinese people improve their English - and the former world English-speaking champion is realizing his dream thanks to the Chinese social media platform WeChat.

More than 16,000 students are learning English on Youlinyouke, an official account on WeChat, founded by Xia. The 32-year-old says he has more than 10 top teachers in the venture.

Xia won the International Public Speaking Competition hosted by the English Speaking Union in the United Kingdom in 2005. In addition to winning many other awards, Xia was much sought after at China's biggest English-training school, New Oriental Education and Technology Group.

He says WeChat users account for a large chunk of mobile Internet spending, so it was easier to start his program on WeChat rather than creating an app himself.

"We think that adult learners' English-learning market is definitely online, and mobile terminals are more and more important. Also, on WeChat we have to invest only a little," he says.

Moreover, with WeChat, students can study anywhere at any time they want, for example, while commuting, he says.

He says that on WeChat, teachers can, in addition to text, send pictures and videos to students, and also interact with them on WeChat groups.

"Internet is like a classroom without boundaries. For example, when I teach a book that is about 700 pages, about 6,000 students are studying at the same time. It is also cheap, as the 700-page materials and the whole teaching course that takes about 300 hours costs the learners only 500 yuan ($77; 69 euros) each. It is impossible to have a course like this offline."

He says that he has seen many exam-oriented education programs that he dislikes and so teachers in his program have combined different ways of teaching English and then deliver the information in a humorous and interesting way.

"Our concept is to use the best English materials and simplest English-learning methods and offer the best teachers. Moreover, we have so many students in the online community they won't feel alone while learning."

He says he needs to pay only about 0.5 percent of his income to WeChat, and, of course, does not have to spend on rent for physical classrooms.

"You need to pay to support a platform so that the platform will be able to continuously serve you and innovate."

However, he says that there are some special functions, such as live broadcasting, and IPR protection that WeChat cannot offer at the moment, so he is considering starting his own app.

"But even if we have our own app, we would still be connected to WeChat."

Ren Chao, a researcher with big data analysis and ratings firm Analysys International, says that starting a business such as e-commerce, services, marketing or media on WeChat has increasingly become a common phenomenon, and WeChat is encouraging more people to do that.

He says that the functions that WeChat offers still cannot match what a specific app could offer to startups, but in the future, the gap will definitely decrease.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 03/18/2016 page8)