The Digital Provision of Private Supplementary Tutoring in China: Innovation, Power and Surveillance

• In Event: Examining the role of technology, coaching, and indicators on teachers and teacher professional development

Proposal

This paper focuses on the development of digital provision in China’s shadow education system of private supplementary tutoring. Until the introduction of fierce regulations in 2021, China had experienced dramatic growth of shadow education with institutionalization and professionalization. The largest tutoring companies used technology to reduce tutoring costs, expand provision, and improve tutees’ learning experiences. They created apps to facilitate classroom interactions and to gamify learning.

Digital platforms for teaching research also brought tutors and teaching-researchers together to refine curriculum and instruction. The dual-tutor mode had been a popular strategy for market expansion since the mid-2010s. Lead tutors concentrated on teaching hundreds or even thousands of tutees, while assistant tutors and AI facilitated classroom interactions and provided personalised feedback. Rapid development of technology made online tutoring more attractive and facilitated its massification. The pressures for innovation and the rewards from success led to new modes of delivery through educational technology (EduTech), including blended learning, adaptive learning and learning robots.

Covid-19 then pushed tutoring further into the digital space. The market penetration rate increased from 6.8% in 2013 to 15% of all students in 2019, and jumped dramatically to 85% in early 2020 with the Covid-19 crisis. Modes of online tutoring for mass production at relatively low prices were offered widely by companies competing for consumers. Accessibility and affordability increased, facilitating massification of shadow education. Tutors and tutees were exposed online to close monitoring through evaluation and assessment tools, with little attention to privacy protection. These all reflected the expanded power of capital and technology in shadow education. Venture investors used shadow education to accumulate capital, while technology companies manipulated it for both capital and data.

Based on empirical research on the digitalisation of tutoring in China, this paper provides a typology to conceptualize digital provision of shadow education. It employs comparative case studies to illustrate how different institutional cultures shape different orientations of digital provision, resulting in varied implications for education. It further investigates how the power of capital and technology can foster education innovations but also breed surveiliance capitalism.

Author

• Wei Zhang, East China Normal University