Hailiang Education and China's Authoritative Official Media Jointly Introduced the Non-Profit Cloud Classroom; the First Lecture Attracted More Than One Million People

HANGZHOU, China, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Affected by COVID-19 ^[1], the start of the spring semester of the K-12 schools in China has been postponed. As an industry leader in private education, Hailiang Education ("Company") develops creative ideas and models to enable students to enjoy high-quality and intimate educational services at home. The Company and China's authoritative official media, People's Daily and Xinhuanet, jointly launched Hailiang Education non-profit Cloud Classroom on February 12 and February 13, respectively. On February 15, Hailiang Education non-profit Cloud Classroom was officially launched on the "Learning Power" learning platform under Ministry of Publicity of China. By fully integrating high-quality educational resources and the platform resources of China's authoritative official media, Hailiang Education provides primary, middle, and high school students in China with free video courses covering various subjects, which allowing students to "have books, classes, and progress" at home.

Hailiang Education is invested and established by the world's top 500 enterprises Hailiang Group. The Company was founded in 1995 and has 25 years of experience in operating basic education and 18 years of experience in operating international education. It has built a high-end education brand through its basic educational program, international program, art educational program and educational training, etc. As of June 30, 2019, Hailiang Education has 134 senior teachers, 8 special-grade teachers, 15 golden Olympiad competition training coaches, and 235 teachers with masters or doctoral degrees.

Due to Hailiang Education's abundant educational resources, outstanding facility capabilities, and technical advantages, the non-profit Cloud Classroom has been warmly welcomed by K-12 students and parents. Mr. Cuiwei Ye, the principal general of Hailiang Education, taught the first lecture of Spring Semester 2020 in the non-profit Cloud Classroom, "Everything has a crack, that is where the light comes in". This class was watched by more than one million students, parents and people.

For the students of Hailiang Education, the Company has set up an online platform – "VIP Cloud Classroom" – to connect teachers with students. Unlike most schools, the VIP Cloud Classroom does not adopt a mode of recording and broadcasting courses that are passively selected and clicked by students. Instead, students are able to participate in online live lessons instructed by their original teachers with their original classmates. In the VIP Cloud Classroom, the head teacher plays the role of "Super Steward" and the teacher changes the identity as "Network Anchor". Furthermore, students can exchange learning experiences with each other, and teachers are able to provide students with answers and guidance to any problem students have encountered during class. Since the class began on February 10, 2020, Hailiang Education has opened 1,470 VIP Cloud Classroom, with more than 30,000 classes, and tens of thousands of students have participated in online learning.

Mr. Junwei Chen, the president of Hailiang Education Management Group, commented, "The COVID-19 brought huge challenges to all aspects of China, but Hailiang Education persisted in innovation and turned crisis into opportunity to launch the "VIP Cloud Classroom" as soon as possible. VIP Cloud Classroom not only simply moves offline classrooms to online, but also combines various types of digital learning resources, electronic digital products, and learning methods to meet the needs of current and prospective students. The VIP Cloud Classroom provides accurate and efficient learning ecology for teachers and students. The VIP Cloud Classroom is not a substitute for school during the epidemic, but as a creative initiative, it has become a new starting point and milestone of the Company to improve the quality of comprehensive teaching, break reality and virtual boundaries, expand effective education supply, and promote teachers' role change."

The "non-profit Cloud Classroom" and the "VIP Cloud Classroom" are technically supported and implemented by Hailiang Mingyou, the educational training section of Hailiang Education. Hailiang Mingyou focuses on the mid-to-high end K-12 education and training market, including subject tutoring, children's English and quality courses, through offline and online educational training courses to ensure that there is no difference in the quality of the courses and provide students with a variety of education models. The online education of Hailiang Mingyou will target third- and fourth-tier cities in China, introduce famous teachers to small and medium-sized cities to solve the problem of the unfair educational resources. At present, Hailiang Mingyou has initiated two learning centers in Hangzhou and Zhuji City, Zhejiang Province.

^[1] COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019) is a virus (more specifically, a coronavirus) identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China. The latest situation summary updates are available on The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's web page COVID-19, Wuhan, China.

SOURCE Hailiang Education