23-year-old wants to ease workload of teachers

By Liu Wei (chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2015-05-04 11:21

The screenshot of the Yitiku website.

It is visibly apparent in his company. Many post-90s entrepreneurs love starting their business with their friends or hiring people who are also born after 90s, while the middle aged are clearly the majorities in Wu's company.

In this less than 40 staff company, over 10 employees are experienced teachers focusing on answering and organizing the test questions.

An outsourced team with more than a 100 teachers helps checking and writing all the answers from the test papers they've collected — a fundamental data to the system.

Wu's idea of building this teacher-centered system relates to his experience in college.

Back then, he often went to schools to rent the room or place for shooting and he talked frequently with teachers. He noticed that teachers were tired of preparing test papers for students and spent remarkably large amount of time checking those papers.

China is renowned for its exam-oriented education system which is deeply rooted and hard to change in short time. Students have to do large amount of exercises so that they can prepare themselves better for the exams. The tedious work of teachers rang the bell inside Wu's entrepreneur mind.

Moreover, the government is starting to favor the combination of traditional education and technology, giving Wu one more reason to focus on online education. Given the boom in online education right now, it may come as a surprise to many, but back in 2010 China brought up the idea of education informatization as the goal for the next decade, which left a hint of the technology-led revolution on the tradition education field.

"Over 70 percent functions of our system are designed for teachers because the market for students is already taken. We need to find a more specific market to live on," Wu said.

Yitiku offers teachers all functions related to exams. It solves an array of questions the teachers may have by analyzing the test results: what type of questions are the hardest, how many times they have appeared in the exams before, how students perform on the paper, etc.

The system is also able to push notifications for the students about the related questions they might have made mistakes in based on previous records.

Wu said the system will be further developed to ease the teachers' burden. It will help them to monitor students' response to a course and increase the interaction between them.