Tencent launches new smart education solution

Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd on Wednesday unveiled a new smart education solution dubbed WeLearning, betting big on the country's booming smart education market.

Tencent said it will build an education platform to empower its partners, which will offer services and systematic solutions for learning, teaching, management and other related education scenarios.

The Shenzhen-based Chinese gaming and social media titan, which owns popular instant messaging app WeChat and mobile games like King of Glory, has over 20 years of experience in fields like connection, technology and content, and is dedicated to serving as a digital assistant to help drive the transformation and upgrading of the education sector.

"Together with our partners, we are committed to empowering the education industry with technological means," Dowson Tong, senior executive vice-president of Tencent, said during Tencent's first MEET EdTech Innovation Summit held on Wednesday in Beijing.

"The first aim is to provide learners with timely process feedback and personalized learning solutions, which will help improve their performance. The second is to help teachers reduce repetitive labor and improve efficiency. The third is to help managers reduce costs and increase efficiency," Tong added.

During the summit, Tencent also unveiled a smart education plan to promote the construction of informatization infrastructure in education and help improve teachers' informatization competence.

Under the plan, Tencent will work with management departments, institutions and partners to offer high-quality education resources for 100 poverty-stricken counties, build 1,000 smart campuses with digital management and learning platforms, and cultivate 10,000 campus chief information officers.

In May, Tencent officially announced the formation of the Tencent Education brand. So far, Tencent Education has served more than 18,000 schools, over 400 provincial and municipal education bureaus, more than 90,000 educational institutions and over 400 million users.

A new report was issued during the summit.

Released by the Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University, Tencent Research Institute and Tencent Education, the 2019 regional digital learning index report highlighted the uneven digital learning development between different regions, as the eastern and southern regions performed well while the western and northern regions were less developed in terms of digital learning.

According to the report, Beijing topped all other regions in terms of the development of digital learning, followed by Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.