From November 25th to 26th, the GES 2019 Future Education Conference was held in Beijing. At the sub-forum with the theme of "The more open the education industry is, the better the future of education", the open education platform of TAL Education Group reviewed the achievements of its first year of open operations and announced its plans for further deepening openness in the future. In addition, TAL Education also released the AI content production platform PHOENIX, which helps educational institutions upgrade AI courses, and shared the latest research results in learning science.

Under the framework of the National New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Open Innovation Platform for Smart Education, TAL Education's open platform will continuously deepen its openness to gather industry partners and create a better future for the education industry together.

Education open platform partners exceed 4,500 and will serve 20,000 institutions in the next three years.  

TAL Education Group's Chief Technology Officer and President of Open Platform Business Unit, Huang Yan, shared the insights brought to education by this year's Nobel Prize in Economics at the sub-forum. This year's Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to three economists who studied "education for poverty alleviation" and found that learning math can help impoverished areas break free from the "poverty trap". The global education industry can only help more children receive a good education and break free from the "poverty trap" through accelerated development.

Huang Yan, CTO and President of Open Platform Business Unit of TAL Education Group, delivering a speech

After more than ten years of exploration, TAL Education Group discovered two rules for the advancement of education: First, the refinement of teaching roles improves the quality of education. Dividing teaching roles can give more attention to each student and allow teachers to focus more on nurturing, thereby improving the overall quality of education. Second, the division of the education industry changes the uneven distribution of resources. The subdivision of the education industry makes each link in the entire education industry chain more mature, so that high-quality educational resources can benefit more regions and empower more schools and institutions.

TAL Education's open platform was officially launched at the 2018 GES Conference after continuous exploration and practice. In the past year, the open platform, which used technology to drive educational progress, has served 4,500 educational institutions. Through products such as Future Magic School, Le Wai Jiao, and Live Cloud, TAL Education has utilized over 16 years of technology accumulation, a repository of over a hundred million questions, and over 5 million educational research contents and high-quality teaching staff to reach 260 cities and regions nationwide, helping to achieve a more equitable and higher quality education.

"Open platforms are born out of the maturity of the education industry. TAL Education takes openness seriously, and this is not only a mindset, but also an ability!" Looking to the future, Huang Yan said, "In the next three years, we will support over 20,000 institutions, covering 5 million students. At the same time, we will open up more subjects, gradually enrich service types, and provide higher quality products and services to institutions."

Also, TAL Education's open products and services have been recognized by its partners. "Every week, teachers at Future Magic School supervise our work in the teaching group, provide feedback every week, and assess performance every month, even more diligently than I do. We hope to be with TAL Education and go further." Lulu Jing, a teacher from Henan Xuecheng Wuyou Education, a partner of Future Magic School, shared her cooperation experience at the event. Over the past year of cooperation, Henan Xuecheng Wuyou Education has not only successfully expanded its subjects, but also achieved a 96% renewal rate for the autumn semester.

Lulu Jing, a teacher from Henan Xuecheng Wuyou Education, a partner of Future Magic School, shared her experience of the cooperation

Future Magic School is an online extracurricular training platform under TAL Education Group, and it is the first strategic project of the open education platform. It provides "technology + content + management" products and services for educational institutions through "dual-teacher classrooms", "future excellent courses", and "principals' colleges".

AI content platform helps educational institutions produce AI course, cognitive science decodes educational "passwords"

Huang Yan said, "The accumulation of basic research is something we have always insisted on. If content accumulation is the ammunition for better supply, then the development of AI technology is the strong support for educational innovation; and foundational research in brain and cognitive science is the source of inspiration for learning." At this conference, TAL Education introduced the "three-level rockets" that empower educational and training institutions with AI, namely providing standardized AI courses for offline small and medium-sized institutions, providing customized content tools for offline medium and large-scale institutions through an AI content platform, and providing underlying technology support for online and offline institutions through an AI capability platform.

The general manager of Le Wai Jiao at TAL Education, Chen Tiloan, pointed out that the current upstream industry chain of education lacks high-quality content supply, and educational institutions are faced with the dilemma of resource scaling and personalized student demand. In response to this problem, TAL Education began to focus on the development of education artificial intelligence five years ago.

Chen Tiloan, General Manager of Le Wai Jiao at TAL Education, introducing the AI content production platform PHOENIX

Prior to this, TAL Education provided AI content to educational institutions through Future Magic School and Le Wai Jiao. At the conference, Chen Tiloan introduced the AI content production platform PHOENIX, which integrates and opens up essential components required for producing AI courses, such as underlying technical support, hardware and software solutions, material libraries, interactive component libraries, classroom data models, and standards for recording classes, so that every organization can produce AI courses with data intelligence and personalized interactive capabilities. It is reported that this platform will be officially launched on December 25th.

The direction of future talent is the direction of the development of the open platform. Two years ago, TAL Education established a brain science laboratory and a research and development department in Silicon Valley. At the conference, the head of the Silicon Valley research and development department at TAL Education, Bao Beibei, released the latest research progress in learning science – the PAC subject cognitive literacy framework. This framework combines the PaaS platform and tool-based products, IRT and other evaluation tools, as well as related theoretical foundations and knowledge graph technologies, to visualize the mastery of key knowledge in the learning process, analyze in-depth suitable educational teaching methods and evaluation methods for cognitive development and cognitive rules of students' brains, and ultimately realize teaching based on the students' aptitude.

Bao Beibei, head of the Silicon Valley research and development department at TAL Education, releasing the latest research progress in learning science

Huang Yan said technology and sharing are the two key elements for the development of the open education platform at TAL Education. TAL Education will continue to increase the research and development of scientific and educational products, conduct in-depth studies of learning science, and ultimately empower industry partners with technological innovation and research achievements through the open platform.

Achievements need to be shared, and ecosystems need to be jointly built. The open education platform of TAL Education will always adhere to the concept of "cooperation to achieve common prosperity, openness to achieve win-win results", connecting global educational resources, gathering educational innovation exploration and practice across the entire industry, helping future-oriented educational and training institutions, empowering future-oriented teachers, cultivating future-oriented students, jointly building an open platform oriented towards the future, and creating a fairer, higher quality, and warmer education together.

Around the National Smart Education Innovation and Open Platform, TAL Education is promoting the deep integration of its own and industry resources, providing basic support capabilities to the education industry, and in the future, it will expand the coverage of high-quality education resources through open cooperation, promote education fairness, improve education quality, enhance the service level and capabilities of educational resources, and drive the development of related industries while serving the industry itself.