China's e-learning firm sets up American office

VIPKID offers one-on-one online English teaching [File photo: baidu.com]

A Chinese company which offers one-on-one online tutorials for children has opened an American branch in the United States.

The move is deemed as part of its strategy for building a global network for e-learning.

Kailey Lane spends early mornings and late nights teaching English from her home as her part-time job. Teaching 25 students a week, she earns around 20 U.S. dollars per hour using the platform VIPKID.

Some of her students are from Beijing and are getting an early start in English.

Kailey suggests she feels her job is rewarding as it allows her to learn different cultures while teaching.

"VIPKID is very precise. All of the lessons are already preset. I would say the most rewarding part of this job is that I am able to interact with another culture from home, I think that is so unique and unlike anything else," said Kailey

Beijing-based VIPKID now has around 10-thousand teachers from the U.S. and Canada, giving lessons in English, math and science to 100- thousand students mainly from China.

VIPKID has recently opened an office in the Silicon Valley

The company is backed by major investors, and with their help it has raised over 120 million U.S. dollars so far. The education tech venture capital firm Learn Capital is one of the investors.

Robert Hutter, managing partner of Learn Capital believes his company can get a huge chunk in China's early childhood education market.

"English language learning is one of the single largest markets in education, somewhere between 100 and 150 billion dollars in USD terms. Some people say it is twice that. The kids' segment is an incredibly important one. We all have an intuitive sense that if you learn a language when you are young it is a lot easier to learn and it persists throughout your lifetime," said Robert.

VIPKID is starting its own research institute led by a Stanford professor in order to stay at the forefront of education.

Bruce McCandliss, a professor from the education department at Stanford University, suggests this is an opportunity to do discovery learning.

He said: "What I am really looking for is to play the role of scientific adviser for helping this collaboration work; to impart the value of science for people who are trying to implement this for learning goals with children, as well as seek out new opportunities for what we can learn with this new innovation where suddenly 100,000 children in China are being tutored systematically by 10,000 teachers in the United States."

VIPKID founder and CEO Cindy Mi also revealed VIPKID's long-term vision and mission.

She said: "We will be able to understand how we can make learning more effective, and then the vision will bring VIPKID services to a global scale. In the future, in the next 10 to 20 years, we can apply this to K-12 education in general, thereby solving the problem of education access, namely- high quality content teaching services, and also promoting equality in education."

Early childhood education in China is expected to pose an increasing potential for growth especially after the authorities rolled out the two-child policy.