教育直播的崛起 The rise of online live-streaming in education

Ever since the popularization of livestreaming entertainment by Bytedance (or DouYin/Tiktok) in China, there has been a boom in usage of this technology around the world as a result of this phenomenon. Anything from funny video clips of farmers selling their produce to makeup artist flaunting their stuff has been uploaded and forwarded billions of times through mainstream platforms like Tiktok. The market size of this livestreaming industry is expected to reach $70.05 billion by 2021 (Forbes, 2017).

字节跳动公司的抖音率先在娱乐领域普及了线上直播，全世界各领域继而出现运用直播的井喷。从农民伯伯的接地气农产品广告到美妆博主的夸张带货，这些视频被上传到主流直播平台如抖音并被成千上万地转发。据2017福布斯报道，直播行业的市场份额在2021年可能达到700.5亿美金。

So what does this mean for education? Unlike mainstream entertainment, this tool is a double-edge sword for teachers and students alike. It is firstly a less interactive synchronous tool that teachers could use to launch live lectures, with feedback comments on the side from their students. Drawing parallels from a webinar, a livestream tool is somewhat democratizing education by providing students with access to teachers who have previous geographic limitations or economic conditions. Another reason for using this tool as I’ve noticed in our online classes is that even with limited connectivity, it allows for students to join in and listen to the teacher speak for hours on end, plus easily access the playbacks made available on various platforms. On the flip side, these online live stream tools have also attracted teachers to prefer this choice of delivery over other conferencing or asynchronous methods, as it (+)takes much less time to prepare for the online sessions, plus it empowers them to be that “sage on the stage” without getting overwhelmed with providing student feedback. In a sense, it allows teachers to be less distracted by the background sounds of students as compared to video conferencing calls. However, it still allows teachers to monitor and moderate by using speech to see if students are consciously paying attention to class, while serving a much bigger audience if needed. At the moment, some private edtech players like Gen Shui Xue have managed to host classes of more than 1000 students (Pandaily, 2020).

那么这对教育意味着什么呢？与主流娱乐不同，此工具对于老师和学生都是一把双刃剑。首先，它是一种交互性较低的同步工具，主要流程是教师直播现场讲座而学生在另一面提供反馈。与在线研讨会类似，直播工具使学生接触到以往因为地理限制或经济限制而无法接触到的老师，在某种程度上使教育民主化。正如我在在线课程中观察到的那样，使用此工具的另一个原因是，即使连接受限，它也可以让学生加入并听老师讲几个小时，而且还可以轻松在各平台回播内容。另一方面，有些老师也更喜欢这种直播工具，因为与其他会议或异步教学方式相比，它有很多优点（+）：老师花费更少的时间准备在线会议，成为课堂的焦点，不需要花很大精力给学生反馈。从某种意义上说，直播与视频会议相比，学生对老师的干扰更少，但教师依然能够使用语音监控和调整课堂进度以抓住学生的注意力，也更适合学生听众多的时候。目前，像“跟谁学“这样的私人教育技术公司已经成功举办过1000多名学生的课程（Pandaily，2020年）。

The (-) downsides of these livestream tools however is that it create cult-like following, and in education terms, this means a lot of “famous teachers” or ming shi名师in Chinese. These mingshis have gathered as online celebrity teachers these days due to their easy to understand instructions and explanations which students particularly enjoy, however they don’t seem to tackle the harder concepts. That being said, online live streaming has been made affordable and readily available platforms like Dingtalk, Tiktok, etc, students to far-reaching places from the countryside to cities. This has improved the ability for anyone to attend these classes for a fraction of the price and time. On top of that, there is a certain element of restriction and monitoring that allows schools or government to be able to access the videos of teacher’s classes without their permission and might bite teachers in the back when it comes to evaluation of their classes.

直播工具的缺点(-)：它会产生许多盲目信众，在教育领域，这意味着出现很多“名师”。这些人之所以成为 “名师” 会在线上平台成为“网红老师”主要因为他们善于用学生喜闻乐见的方式去讲解概念，但很多时候他们可能会把概念简单化或直接回避艰深的概念。

话虽如此，在线直播在各大平台如 Dingtalk，Tiktok都非常容易，学生不管是在农村还是城市都可以参与，且只需花费少量时间和价格。还有有一点不容忽视，直播可能会跟教学评估或监管联系在一起， 例如学校领导和政府可能在未经老师许可的情况下观看教师的直播视频，而这些视频可能在教学评估时成为老师的软肋。

Still, due to the unforeseen circumstances this virus period has provided, teachers across China today are starting to get innovative with their online teacher practices

尽管如此，新冠肺炎病毒的防疫期间，直播工具给全中国教师开了一扇大门。这些教师开始学习并创新包括直播工具在内的教育技术:

Fig 1: One cost-effective way that was used basically involved pen and paper to simulate an online whiteboard, as the teacher held their phone cameras to deliver online physics class, as illustrated in this photo. All you need here is a prop stand that can hold your cellphone, a pen and paper. Talk about substitution of technology!  如图所示是一种低成本方式，简单用笔和纸来模拟在线白板，老师拿着手机摄像头来进行在线物理课。您需要的不过是一个可以放手机，笔和纸的支撑架。这不就是技术替代嘛！

Fig 2: Another notable example of how teachers utilize Microsoft’s One Note alongside the livestream tool from Dingtalk to delivery an online math session utilizing only a mouse and laptop. I particularly like this method as it shows that even with the simplest tech, you can still achieve a highly effective class by utilizing pre-existing platforms to conduct it. This teacher further emphasized the need for collecting homework through online cloud drives such as Microsoft One Drive or Ding Drive which are freely available to anyone to download. This is also beyond substitution as it takes it one step up the SAMR model to augmentation whereby technology acts a direct substitute but with functional improvements such as sharing and collaborating with others online for homework. 另一个值得注意的例子是教师借用Microsoft的One Note以及Dingtalk的直播功能，仅用鼠标和笔记本电脑就可以进行在线数学课程。我特别喜欢这种方法，因为它表明，即使用最简单的技术，您也可以通过既有平台上好一节高效课堂。这位老师还强调需要通过在线云盘（例如Microsoft One Drive或DingDrive）收集作业，并且任何人都可以免费下载。这也是不可替代的，因为它将SAMR模型提升了一步，从而使技术可以直接被替代也具有功能上的改进，例如与其他人在线共享和协作进行家庭作业。

All in all, the livestream mode has its perks when it comes to low-cost and widely dispensing online class technology. This is the model that is truly unique to China’s education at the moment and will probably catch on in other countries as we speak.

总而言之，直播在减低成本和扩大规模上具有优势。这是目前中国教育真正独特的模式，很可能正在其他国家流行开来。

The SAMR model for technology...this is the standard for us to understand how technology can truly impact learning.

Note: The livestream function is now made available by different platforms such as Dingtalk (Alibaba subsidiary), Tencent Video Conferencing (腾讯视频) and will be soon made available on Zoom if it hasn’t already. Technology players are definitely going to be at the forefront of this innovation and I hope to see more of this soon. 注意：直播功能在很多平台如钉钉（阿里巴巴公司的应用），腾讯会议上都有，Zoom平台如果现在还没有那也很快会有。技术使用者必定会走在这场革新的前沿，期待更多创新！

Special credit to Bridget Huang！非常感谢春华完美地翻译了这篇文章！