The Mobile Monday team in Shanghai had organized tonight an evening on e-learning in China that was rather successful, not only because it was well-organized but the participants (both in the panel and the audience) gave also rather candid responses.
First discovery: two of the three companies in the panel made they money through e-learning not in China, but in the US, said Joseph Constanty of Lexdex (who will start beta-testing soon) and Steve Williams of the famous site www.chinesepod.com. Both had plans for China but were not really concrete.
Wilson Cheng of Unbound Learning was working in China, both on a subscription basis and with advertisers, so he got the unavoidable question about his relationship with quasi-monopolist China Mobile, who is known for squeezing out their content providers. He considered that relationship very friendly and added that such a friendly relationship would create barriers for others to enter the markets. A very telling statement.
From the audience a representative of Jiaotong University illustrated in another the dominance of government relations in this field. She advised the online e-learning sites to position themselves rather as additional services to the existing Chinese education, providing training, rather than education. A competitive relationship with the traditional educational institutions seemed not smart. Again, a very nice and telling statement.
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