TAL offers lessons in innovation

Leading Chinese education company TAL Education Group unveiled its latest technology products and solutions on Wednesday, making no secret of its desire to step up technology efforts to back up its online businesses.

The smart class solution called WISROOM works like a futuristic class where students' reactions including voice, gestures and facial expressions are analyzed in real time. Teachers receiving real-time feedback will adjust their teaching platforms and give one-on-one personalized tutoring.

As part of its AI Lab project, the solution is only one of TAL's technological innovations revealed at its AI Summit this year.

Zhang Bangxin, founder and CEO of TAL, said: "The company is striving to advance education through technology to build a large-scale, low-cost and high-quality online education experience."

Industry analysts pointed out that the move will back up the company's online businesses to gain a larger market share as leading companies such as TAL and New Oriental adjust their strategies to focus on online business.

The online business unit of New Oriental filed on Tuesday for an initial public offering in Hong Kong with its prospectus showing that its total paid users exceeded 1.4 million in the nine months ending in February.

Wu Yue, a senior analyst at China International Capital Corp Ltd, said that online businesses are expected to become the next big growth point for companies such as TAL.

"TAL is transforming from offline to online with its years of experience in teaching and research and online technologies advantages. It is accelerating its online businesses to gain a lead in the market," said Wu.

TAL's fiscal report showed that revenue of Xueersi Online School, the online subsidiary of TAL, soared by some 158 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of the 2018 fiscal year.

"No educational company can achieve continuous high growth only with offline business. So we look high upon strategic transformation from offline to online," said Wu.