The entanglement of online teachers： the income can exceed online celebrity’s part-time job but it is illegal
You can choose your own teachers from all over the country by turning on your mobile phone, and you can listen to the courses you want without leaving home. Recently, a news that "online teachers earn 10,000 yuan an hour, earning more than online celebrity" has aroused everyone’s concern about the online live tutoring platform, and the main controversy lies in whether public teachers can teach part-time on the online platform and the management of the online tutoring platform.
Win-win brought by technology?
"This is the best class I have ever heard", and the platform of "Ape Tutoring" quoted a sentence from students in response to the statement of Nanjing Education Bureau that "teachers should be prohibited from conducting online tutoring".
On the platform of "Ape Tutoring" and similar online tutoring, students can choose their teachers freely, and every student who has taken classes can grade their teachers, which will become a reference for other students to choose their teachers, but in traditional classrooms, students can’t choose their teachers freely. In addition to one-on-one tutoring, you can also choose special courses attended by many people. A special course often costs only a few yuan. Students can listen to high-quality courses with little money, and at the same time, staying at home also breaks the space restriction and saves the transportation cost. Therefore, the "Ape Tutoring" platform believes that it is committed to making students in China share excellent educational resources. "When the public pays more attention to the high income of online teachers, we suggest that everyone should pay more attention to the benefits brought by students."
Huo Ruiqin, a teacher on the platform of "Ape Tutoring", agrees with this view. Students can enjoy some educational resources that were difficult to obtain before on the Internet. And she thinks it is also an opportunity and a challenge for teachers. Huo Ruiqin is a normal student, and will become a formal biology teacher after graduation in September this year. She believes that the online tutoring platform has given her a good opportunity to exercise, and the grading mechanism and more diverse students on the platform have forced teachers to pay more attention to the quality of courses. Sometimes you have to prepare classes in the library for several days from morning till night in order to broadcast live. Although many people on the Internet are concerned about Wang Yu’s high income, as an online tutor, Huo Ruiqin believes that income is directly proportional to pay. Teacher Wang Yu’s remarks can also confirm this point. He once spent almost all his time preparing lessons, and even got sick. In order to help students better, Huo Ruiqin also set up a group to answer students’ questions after class, and occasionally played some small jokes with students in the group.
Contradiction with the existing system
In 2015, the Ministry of Education issued the "Regulations on Prohibiting Paid Make-up Classes for Primary and Secondary School Teachers and In-service Primary and Secondary School Teachers", which prohibited primary and secondary school teachers from making part-time paid make-up classes, but did not make relevant provisions on the specific form of online education platform. Afterwards, the relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Education said in an interview that online tutoring is a new form in recent years and is still under study, but teachers should not affect normal teaching by participating in online paid teaching.
The phenomenon that teachers give students paid remedial classes has been repeatedly banned, which has also brought some problems. In order to attract more students to attend paid make-up classes, some teachers deliberately keep some content in their usual classes. Some teachers don’t pay much attention to school courses because the income from making up lessons is much higher than that from normal classes. These are the reasons why the Ministry of Education previously banned paid remedial classes. Ms. Ding from Jiangxi told the author that her son went to the teacher’s home to make up lessons every day after class in junior high school. The teacher would tell the students the answers to the homework in the paid make-up class, so the students were willing to participate, but it didn’t actually drive the students’ thinking. For those unconscious students, the grades not only didn’t improve, but might be counterproductive. "But making up lessons has become a trend."
Fang Fang, an associate researcher at the Institute of Educational Law of Tianjin Academy of Educational Sciences, wrote that online tuition fees should be banned and pointed out a deeper problem: "From the perspective of the attributes of school education, publicity is the basic attribute of modern education. Compulsory education, in particular, belongs to compulsory, public welfare and universal education provided by the state to school-age children. It is different from ordinary commodities, which can be freely traded by buyers and sellers, but needs to be regulated and managed through the power of the state and the school system. If in-service primary and secondary school teachers are indulged in making up lessons with compensation, the public product attribute of compulsory education will be alienated and public education resources will be privatized, which not only damages children’s equal right to receive education, but also violates the basic spirit of China’s compulsory education law. "
An extension of educational equity?
The author interviewed Gao Bing, an associate researcher of Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences, about the online education platform for public teachers. She believes that on the one hand, the government has issued relevant regulations to better safeguard the rights and interests of students and parents and standardize the behavior of teachers; On the other hand, the special evaluation report on the construction of teachers in the Outline of the National Medium-and Long-term Education Reform and Development Plan (2010-2020) points out that compared with other industries, the salary of teachers in China is not high, and the salary increase rate is low, which fails to reflect the status and treatment that teachers should have as professionals, and teachers’ part-time jobs are excusable. Therefore, at this stage, it is difficult to cut across the board the problem of teachers’ paid part-time jobs, and their motives should be considered.
Although most people focus on whether public teachers can work part-time on the online platform, Gao Bing thinks that we should pay more attention to the online tutoring platform from the perspective of educational equity. From the supplier of educational resources, the online education platform is the supplement of educational resources, and the educated have more opportunities to choose education, which is a kind of fairness of educational opportunities. From the demand side of educational resources, limited by economic level and geographical conditions, not everyone has the conditions and ability to enjoy online education. If online education is charged again, it will amplify the role of the market in the allocation of educational resources, and it is easier to form the Matthew effect, that is, people with good economic conditions can occupy more high-quality resources, which will aggravate the unfairness of education. Therefore, it is necessary for the government to improve the unfair allocation of online education resources through the adjustment of policies and institutional mechanisms.
In the process of interviewing and collecting information, the author found that many people, including part-time teachers and online tutoring platforms, believe that the development of "Internet+education" is the general trend in the future. Gao Bing told the author that "Internet+education" is also strongly advocated and actively constructed by the government. Undeniably, the online education resources under the market mechanism are more dynamic and more in line with the public’s "appetite", but it is inevitable that the quality is mixed, and special attention should be paid to the copyright issues, qualification issues, charging issues and service guarantee issues. "On the one hand, the government should build some online education platforms that meet the needs of basic public services, on the other hand, it should set up corresponding supervision and management mechanisms for online education platforms other than basic public services, guide the online counseling platform to standardize, make the online education market fresh and healthy, and protect consumers’ rights and interests." (Zhou Wei)