At 3:30 pm on February 1st, Gu Fei, the English lecturer of Xueersi Online School under Tomorrow Group, has just finished her first free live broadcast class. That day was the first day when Xueersi Online School under Tomorrow Group provided free live broadcasts to users across the country, and it was also the first day for millions of Chinese children to continue their studies despite school closures.

From 8:30 am to 8:30 pm, Xueersi Online School delivered high-quality educational resources for all subjects from primary school to high school to thousands of households through online live broadcasts.

After the first day of classes, she decided to overturn the lesson preparation

Upon learning that tens of thousands of students from all over the country were listening to her class, Gu Fei felt excited and pressured at the same time. Unlike Xueersi's previous online courses, Gu Fei faced not a fixed class but students from all over the country, each with different learning abilities and levels. To ensure effectiveness, she needed to consider the acceptance abilities of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of children, which was not an easy task.

In addition to teaching, Gu Fei spent all her time on lesson preparation in recent days, with only 3 to 4 hours of sleep each day. Despite the limited time, she was unwilling to relax the standards for class quality. After the first day of free live broadcast class, based on observations in the classroom and feedback from children and parents after class, Gu Fei decided to change the teaching method. In her view, "the first class is a process for teachers and students to get to know each other, and the teaching method will be relatively conservative."

Gu Fei in her work

Changing the teaching method meant overturning the previous lesson preparation and investing more time and energy, but Gu Fei did not hesitate. In order for students to better understand English grammar and sentence structures in the second day's class, Gu Fei extracted many different movie clips such as "Harry Potter" and explained them in combination with the characters' lines in the movies.

After the second day's live class, although Gu Fei was a little tired, the students' attentive state and proactive feedback after class made her excited. "In today's class, the students' attention and active participation have clearly improved a lot." After class, the students' feedback in the live room also verified her feelings. Many children expressed that it was their first time encountering such a novel form of grammar explanation, and they were very focused during class. Some parents left comments on the course page, "Thanks to the teachers for sacrificing a lot of time with their families in order to smoothly implement online classes, and for their hard work in making many preparations, which is very touching."

Returning to work before the city was "locked down"

Even before the free live broadcasts started, the teachers at Xueersi Online School had already started working. Lei Wen, a tutoring teacher for Xueersi Online School from Xianning, Hubei, experienced an extremely turbulent Spring Festival. Before the Spring Festival, she returned to her hometown in the countryside with her parents to prepare for the Chinese New Year as usual.

However, as the situation in Wuhan became more and more serious, she heard the news on the morning of the 30th of the Lunar New Year that Xianning was also "locked down."

Lei Wen was a little anxious, her first reaction was that the network conditions in the countryside were poor, and if the city was locked down, she would not be able to return to work. "As a teacher, I must be responsible for the children." The understanding and support from her parents became Lei Wen's strong support during the epidemic. In the chilly and damp Southern winter, at 7 p. m. that night, Lei Wen's father took her back to the county town on a motorcycle, enduring three hours of cold wind before arriving home.

Since the fourth day of the Lunar New Year, Lei Wen has spent almost all her time in her "small study," communicating, teaching, and providing feedback, until around 11 p.m. before she can rest. Through the preparation and training during the holiday, and through communication and coordination with parents after the announcement of the free classes, since the launch of the free classes, the attendance rate of the classes Lei Wen is responsible for has been very high, reaching over 90%.

Lei Wen preparing for class

Being a live broadcast teacher is also on the front line of the "epidemic"

Zhang Jin is the principal lecturer for science at Xueersi Online School, and when he received the company's message asking if he would be willing to support the free live broadcasts during the epidemic, it was the first day of the Lunar New Year.

Zhang Jin immediately agreed.

Zhang Jin at work

The next day, he rushed back from his hometown in Shandong to Beijing to prepare for class. Throughout the entire Spring Festival, Zhang Jin was only at home for "one day."

"Go back, you are also contributing to the fight against the epidemic." What moved Zhang Jin is that the parents did not object. Instead, upon learning that he needed to return to Beijing earlier to support the free classes, they voluntarily offered to take care of his ten-month-old baby at home. "Before, they would feel that teachers in institutions lacked the sacred sense of a teacher. This time, they felt the selflessness and dedication of teachers from us."

Zhang Jin is not only the principal lecturer for the current free live broadcast classes, but also the long-term lecturer for Xueersi Online School, which means he needs to prepare two different sets of course content at the same time. More importantly, due to the sudden outbreak, he was unable to obtain the teaching materials for the free live broadcast classes in advance. Although Zhang Jin felt great pressure, he chose to give it his all. Aside from his regular teaching and preparation, he spends one to two hours every day preparing for the upcoming free live classes, "doing everything I can to do my best."

During the epidemic prevention and control period, Tomorrow Group is systematically implementing various educational measures. In addition to offering free live classes, they are also providing free live broadcasting platforms and technical support for primary and secondary schools, as well as providing online live broadcast teaching solutions for offline training institutions, and more.

The epidemic does not end, and Tomorrow Group's educational support does not stop. During this special period, the people of Tomorrow Group are demonstrating with their actions that "doing good in education is the greatest public welfare."