Onion Math takes online lessons to remote school
Onion Math, a Chinese online education startup, is bringing its teaching resources to remote schools in rural China in a bid to improve the quality of education in poverty-stricken areas.
Founded in late 2013 in Beijing, Onion Math provides online lessons to Chinese youth in primary and secondary schools. It creates interesting educational videos to explain complex mathematical theories and equations, and trains students to solve math problems through games. The company gained 120 million yuan ($19.1 million) in a series C investment round on Feb 28, adding the total investment value to approximately 300 million yuan.
One of the places Onion Math reached out to is Zhaojue County, located on a plateau in the southern extremity of Sichuan province, an approximately three hour drive from Xichang, the nearest city. There are 70 schools in the county, and one of them is built on a hilltop, called the “cliff school”. Students of the cliff school must take on an 800-meter rock face, scrambling down rickety ladders and clawing their way over bare rocks as they go to school.
“Under the administration of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, most children in Zhaojue are speaking the Yi language, they cannot understand Mandarin well, so the language barrier is one of the problems for education,” Ji Se Fang-sen, the deputy county chief, said on a television program about poverty alleviation. “The lack of teachers is another problem for the county, as many teachers in the cities are reluctant to go to Zhaojue because of its isolated location,” he added.
Hearing those words, Yang Linfeng, chief executive of Onion Math, decided to do his best to help those students in Zhaojue.
“Me and my partners have been emphasizing equal access to education and quality education in China for years, and that’s the reason why we founded Onion Math,” Yang said.
Thanks to the government’s efforts in relieving poverty in rural areas, the infrastructure in Zhaojue has remarkably improved, he said.
“So we can bring our educational materials and online courses to the county to alleviate the burden on the local teachers. They can have time to cater to more students,” Yang said.
Onion Math brought its short videos and online training courses, together with more than 600 exercise books — worth a total of 1.43 million yuan — to Zhaojue. The company staff have been training local teachers to use the materials according to the school curriculum every week since last December. But Onion Math soon found that the teachers in Zhaojue are slow in learning and adopting digital teaching methods.
“It is a gradual process to change the teacher’s teaching methods. We will keep training the teachers to make them more aware of the benefits the digital teaching methods bring,” Yang said.
“I am confident that when the teachers get used to the digital materials, they’ll find it much easier to explain the knowledge with interesting cartoons, and they will work smoother with e-learning methods.”
Onion Math has also cooperated with several nonprofit organizations to support fair education in rural parts of China.