In August 2020, TAL Education officially announced its first open source project. Subsequently, within just one month, TAL Education launched nearly twenty open source components, actively embracing the open source technology community.

As a representative company in the education industry, why did TAL Education choose open source? How will the open source road be traveled? What is the current progress?

From Indigenous to Open Source

The predecessor of TAL Education, Xueersi, was established in 2003. After 17 years of rapid development, TAL Education has become a leading technology education company in China. TAL Education has always adhered to the mission of "love and technology make education better," continuously increased R&D investment, established multiple technology R&D departments such as artificial intelligence, big data, and brain cognition, and has been approved by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security to establish a postdoctoral research workstation.

TAL Education has successively established joint laboratories with Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Computing, and signed strategic cooperation agreements in the fields of educational science, brain and cognition with Beijing Normal University, and conducted joint research projects with Stanford University, East China Normal University, and others.

TAL Education has accumulated a large number of high-quality educational resources and massive teaching data, and also has rich teaching scenarios and application needs. By using technology, TAL Education has promoted the implementation of multiple smart education solutions. In order to achieve shared technical resources and reuse of technical landing experience, TAL Education has established a cross-business technical exchange mechanism internally and actively promoted the construction of the technical middle platform, promoting internal open source. This has also laid a solid foundation for TAL Education's subsequent external open source.

In this regard, CTO of TAL Education, Tian Mi, said, "Open source of code and technical collaboration can greatly reduce the duplicate investment of enterprises and developers, improve R&D efficiency, and reduce operating costs. TAL Education hopes to embrace open source and empower more developers to collaborate and innovate, enabling more technology professionals to build on the experience of their predecessors and help more developers enter the industry ecosystem to create value. This is also the original intention of TAL Education's open source to the outside world."

When Technology Sentiment Encounters National Strategy

In August 2019, the Ministry of Science and Technology issued the "Guidelines for the Construction of the National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Open Innovation Platform," focusing on improving technology innovation R&D capabilities and open sharing service capabilities of basic software and hardware, encouraging the open source and open sharing of various general software and technologies to support all sectors of society in innovation, entrepreneurship, and small and medium-sized enterprises engaging in cutting-edge technology research and development. Against this background, TAL Education became the builder of the national new generation artificial intelligence open innovation platform for smart education. This is also an important reason why TAL Education actively embraces open source.

Tian Mi explained, "Open source will promote the technological landing and upgrading of the education industry, bringing more new momentum to the development of education. As the builder of the national new generation artificial intelligence open innovation platform for smart education, TAL Education will share more technological capabilities with the industry through open source, accelerate the integration and innovation of technology and industry, and achieve a better future for smart education."

In addition, TAL Education also hopes to run and operate the construction of the national open innovation platform for smart education, cooperate with partners from all walks of life, consolidate the basic technology of the education field, and provide high-quality services and support for key technological innovations in smart education, contributing to the establishment of an ecosystem from developers to business scenarios and enhancing the driving force for industry innovation.

Comprehensive Open Source Roadmap

Xie Hualiang, the person in charge of TAL Education's open source project, said, "The education industry has a wide audience, diverse needs, and complex scenarios. Compared with general Internet technology, education technology has its own characteristics and requirements. At present, there is a lack of high-quality open source projects and resources adapted to the education industry in various major technological fields. TAL Education plans to gradually open source a series of practical technology components, education AI capabilities, and educational scenario datasets accumulated internally, filling this industry gap."

From the perspective of open sourcing AI capabilities, TAL Education will promote the open source of AI capabilities in multiple directions such as speech, image, and data foundation for more technological innovation developers in the education field. The national open innovation platform for smart education will also provide open source service interfaces for data labeling, model training, and other AI capabilities, and work with the national open source platform to promote the construction of open source projects for educational AI capabilities.

It is understood that with the construction of the national open innovation platform for smart education, TAL Education's accumulated large-scale educational scenario datasets will gradually be open sourced, and through the establishment of data standards and data service mechanisms, more educational institutions and technology companies will be attracted to open and share more types of educational data through the platform.

TAL Education AI Open Architecture Diagram

Meanwhile, TAL Education hopes to promote the open source of components in six major directions including network services, data storage, live broadcasting, and framework services, to open up general technological capabilities in various educational scenarios, and promote the sharing of platform achievements by participants in the platform ecology.

TAL Education Future Open Source Architecture for General Technology Capabilities

Using Open Source to Achieve a Better Future for Education

Since starting the first open source project, TAL Education has open-sourced nearly twenty projects and technology components covering multiple areas, including general programming language frameworks, general microservice governance, general front-end frameworks, and general technical components for the education industry.

TAL Education actively embracing open source has also won recognition from the open source community. Stars indicate the popularity of a project, with more stars reflecting greater popularity in the open source community. In the first month of open source, TAL Education received more than two thousand stars from a major global open source community. Among them, the number of stars received by key open source components is about 1500. At the same time, the TAL Education open source community, which focuses on serving developers, attracted nearly two thousand open source technology enthusiasts to join in just one month, with high activity and participation. This also demonstrates the high quality and potential of TAL Education's open source projects.

It can be said that as a representative company in the education industry, TAL Education's phased progress and future planning for its first technical open source initiative are a sign of further informatization and digitization of the education industry. For developers committed to the education industry, this is also a new opportunity.