A teacher writes on a blackboard during a class for young earthquake survivors at a temporary housing area after the May 12 earthquake, June 1, 2008 in Dujiangyan, Sichuan Province, China. (Photo : Getty Images)
A Chinese physics teacher is making social media rounds recently for earning up to 18,842 yuan ($2,890) per hour for teaching courses online, although authorities are not so amused.
A total of 2,617 students have registered on Wang Yu's tutoring course on high school-level physics, which is done online at 9 yuan per audience member, according to state-owned news portal Sina.com. The classes, divided into seven groups, have attracted as many as 9,479 students across the country as of Tuesday.
Online educational services are booming in China, with tutoring sites hosting as many as 15 million registered students.
In a report on China's Internet development released in January, 110 million Chinese Internet users had tried online education in 2015. In a separate investigation conducted by Beijing-based Tianto Info Consulting, the online education industry is expected to grow by 28 percent year-on-year in 2016.
Xie Mingbo, a Chinese writing teacher, told Shanghai Daily that he left his job as a classroom teacher in order to teach online full-time.
Xie said his courses, which range from 499 to 799 yuan, has at least 100 paid followers and has earned him more than 1 million yuan in the previous year.
The sites have also become a preferred choice for teachers seeking extra income, as the Internet cuts down on travel time and cost and allows for more flexible instruction.
"A computer with a camera will do, as long as the network is stable," Wang said in an interview.
The low costs and high efficiency of online classes have also made it alluring for parents.
"Compared with real classes that cost one or two hundred yuan, online equivalents are available for less than 10 yuan. I prefer this mode if it helps my child," one parent told Sina.
But while it has drawn praise from the public, online classes have attracted increasing scrutiny from local governments worried about the quality of instruction and the credibility of online teachers. An official from the Education Bureau in Nanjing, the capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, said the city prohibits teachers from offering paid tutoring services including those online.
"Teachers may shift their focus and energy to online teaching, and that will inevitably affect their performance at school. This is unfair to school-goers," said Xiong Bingqi, vice president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute.
Liu Chengbo, a researcher with the Department of Education, said that teaching students is best done through face-to-face interactions.
The traditional classroom's holistic approach to development, teaching children social responsibility, innovative thinking, interpersonal skills, and problem solving ability can never be satisfied by online education, said Liu.
