The Value Proposition

A concept that still seems to be virtually unknown here in China - certainly in the education business.

Time and again, the attitude of "businessmen" I've met here is "We can get people to give us money for this!"

There's rarely any close attention given to how this idea can be marketed, or how customers can be retained for repeat business, or how the project can grow. It's always just a naive and greedy get-rich-quick idea: "People will give us money for this!"

There is never - repeat, never - any analysis of why people should give you their money. 9 times out of 10, I fear, the 'business plan' rests on the assumption that a lot of people out there are gullible saps.

That's especially so in education, where people seem to blindly believe that almost any course of training, any qualification (particularly if it's in a foreign language and/or obtained overseas) will be an automatic passport to a brighter and higher-earning future.

I've never yet been able to divine any sort of rational system behind the pricing of courses. I rather suspect that the rascally 'entrepreneurs' who set up fly-by-night 'training schools' just pluck a number out of the air. And if they can't find any students for a course priced at that level, well.... they might just give up on the idea, as being not lucrative enough for a go-getter like them; or they might try again, after drastically re-pricing the course. It's not as if they've planned out their costs very carefully in advance anyway, so they can easily re-jig their "budget". All it takes is to cajole your foreign teachers into accepting that it was "an honest mistake" when you quoted them 350 RMB per hour for the teaching when what you meant was 350 RMB for each 1 hr 45 min class; or you can double or treble the class size; or you can pad out your teaching roster with non-native English speakers; or..... There are so many ways to trim costs! And students (and teaching staff, unfortunately) will often put up with just about anything; so there's never any need to think about adding value.

I had a rather depressing discussion this morning about just such a course. The school is intending to relay a live video feed of the classes to 6 or 7 other centres all around China, delivering the course to, potentially, some hundreds of students at one time. The fee being quoted, while a little more generous than usual private college rates, takes no account of the fact that a teacher would in effect be teaching 8 classes rather than just one. (Also, of course, there's the near certainty that they will record it all, and use that instead of live teaching in any future courses.)

Quite apart from the Alice-in-Wonderland economics of trying to keep 600 students happy with one underpaid teacher and a video camera, these jokers had given no thought at all to what this would mean to the structure of the course and the style of teaching: they hadn't reflected on the fact that this would pretty much tie you to a lecturing model, with just about no opportunity for group work, and precious little for any sort of teacher-student interaction. And this is a set of topics that really needs to be taught in relatively small classes with a lot of one-to-one teacher supervision. Moreover, they are hoping to base the entire course - around 250-300 hours of teaching - on a single textbook (which, at a guess, probably only includes enough material to fill about 10% or 15% of that timetable, at best).

The guy charged with setting this course up is a 23-year-old graduate student who: 1) has clearly never taught; 2) has never managed anything before in his life; and 3) has so-so but not great English.

He seems a nice enough chap. He just hasn't got a clue what he's doing. I've taken pity on him rather, and have offered some (FREE!) help in trying to knock the course outline into shape.

What baffles me is...... WHO would pay (presumably quite a substantial amount of) money for a few hundred hours of video classes.... offered by a newly-founded school which has, as far as I can gather, never run this or any other course before.... and 'organised' by someone who doesn't know the first thing about budgeting, course design, or timetabling???

So many Chinese entrepreneurs seem to subsist on an unshakeable - if often baseless! - optimism: if you build it, they will come. I doubt if this school has many students signed up yet; but they honestly believe that so long as they can put a native speaker in a lecture hall with a textbook at the beginning of March, hordes of students will come forward and a tsunami of cash will wash through their door.

Unfortunately, I don't think any properly qualified and experienced teacher would touch this sort of shambolic set-up with a bargepole. They shouldn't, anyway; but not everyone is as ethically constrained as I am.

So..... I fear we'll be in performing monkey territory: not particularly good teachers, who are not very familiar with the material, and who don't care that the quantity/quality of the material is inadequate for the intended teaching purpose.

I repeat, WHO are these people who think watching videos of a foreigner reading from a textbook for 10 weeks is going to do much, if anything, to improve their technical English (even assuming - which is unlikely - that it's good sound and picture quality, and that they'll attend regularly, and that they won't sleep through most of it...) or to help them pass an overseas exam??

Perhaps they mistakenly assume that - as with most of the Chinese education system and far too many of the foreign educational programmes being run over here these days - attendance alone will guarantee an exam pass; that the exam will have a low pass mark, that cheating will be condoned if not encouraged and facilitated (typical in China), and that even if they still flunk, the marks can be doctored later. Sorry - not with an independent examining body, NO. You might be able to get away with a little malpractice in the exam room (Chinese invigilators - sigh!), but the marks will be set in stone; and if you don't make the grade, you will FAIL. Maybe you should reconsider if this is really worth spending your money on.

I see this sort of lazy, dumb, slapdash adminstration of educational institutions again and again and again and again. And the really galling thing is that, most of the time, it really wouldn't be that difficult - if just slightly more expensive - to put together an effective, worthwhile, valuable course that you could sell to students on tangible merit. But folks here just don't seem to grasp that concept.

I weep. I bang my head against the wall. If I had a carpet, I would probably chew it.