Online Education

Introduction

There are multiple modes of running K12 Online Schools (Liang, 2006; Zhang, 2006; Wang, 2006). Some are run by a consortium of the government; a private enterprise and a school; a consortium of a private enterprise and a school; or an enterprise or a school alone. The distribution of these modes is about 3 percent, 54 percent, 23 percent, and 20 percent, respectively (Zhang, 2006). In the mode of multilateral cooperation among the government, an enterprise, and a school, operating funds are raised by private enterprises or individuals, or provided in part by government organizations. These online schools mainly provide educational support to poor rural areas or disadvantaged groups. A representative example is the Hope Online School, which is jointly sponsored by the China Youth Development Foundation and the private enterprise Beijing Technology Company.

K through 12 online tutoring/education business

In the mode of enterprise-school cooperation, a private enterprise and an elite K12 school jointly invest and run the K12 Online School. The private enterprise contributes funding and technologies, while the school contributes high-quality courses and teachers. These two partners share the venture risk and profit together. This mode is common (54 percent) and dominant in China today. The investors follow this mode. In the mode of an enterprise alone, a private enterprise takes the risk and profit alone. It has a fixed cooperation relationship with some K12 schools. It purchases necessary courses and employs teachers from the schools.

In the mode of a school alone, the online school is hosted by one or several K12 schools without the support of any enterprises. Its advantages are a simple relationship, high enthusiasm among learners and guaranteed teaching resources. However, the disadvantages are a lack of advanced learning technologies and experiences in enrolment. Most consortia have private enterprises as investors. The K12 Online Schools supported by them do not just aim for resource sharing between schools, but also for financial profits.

In order to better understand the situation of online schools in China, in this article we take the investors as a sample to illustrate its online educational practice, the current status and practical level, the use of ICT, and its experience and lessons. The investors are a professional K12 e-learning institution. It is a collaborative product between an enterprise and a school. The school provides e-learning for primary and secondary school students all over the country and has its own e-learning platform. This platform can support synchronous and asynchronous learning. The school focuses on providing tailor-made services based on students' characteristics. It has become the largest K12 e-learning institution in China. Currently it has nearly 240 branches located in 30 of the 34 provinces in China. We choose this online school mainly because it adopts the most typical enterprise-school joint cooperation mode, and has become one of the largest K12 e-learning institutions in China. It is representative and can provide clear insight into the best practices of online schools. To better investigate the investors, we adapted the questionnaires developed by the PAN-dora Project to collect ...