Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable.
Hello. Welcome to Roundtable, where we serve up piping hot debates on the issues that sizzle in China and beyond.
I'm Yeoheng Lin. Back in the day, forget your homework meant you left a textbook at home.
Now, it means your app didn't sync, your password expired or your AI assistant glitched.
Welcome to 21st century schooling, where even excuses are digitalized.
However, what happens when educational tech oversteps, collecting data without consent, selling features to stressed out families, or replacing learning with automation?
How can we better regulate the digital classrooms?
For today's show, I'm joined by Yu -Hsien and Steve Hatherly.
Now grab your virtual compass and follow us to the heart of the discussion.
Parents are good at multitasking.
For my mom's generation, she used to juggle work, dinner, and keeping me company.
Now, parents are facing a new task, working with more than one apps to help their kids learn.
One for homework, another for class updates, a third for online quizzes, and a pop up ad urging them to unlock advanced features for their nine -year -old spelling test. Multiply that by millions of families.
In the age of educational tech or ed -tech, the digital classroom isn't just crowded.
It's chaotic. And now cities like Zhuhai are asking, should schools draw a line before screens take over learning?
So exactly what is happening in And how come we're having this conversation today?
Yeah, so the Education Bureau of the City of Zhuhai in South China's Guangdong Province has recently issued a notification outlining 10 measures to regulate the use of learning apps while strengthening the management of all educational apps used in schools.
This notice defines the scope of management for educational apps referring to them as mobile applications that focus on educational and teaching scenarios with faculty students and parents as the core users and these apps Serve school management student learning and also parent school interaction.
Yeah, it's so different now, isn't it?
You know classrooms used to be confined to four walls right and When students would have the opportunity to learn it would mean they were in that building in the school in the classroom with the teacher and when they went home maybe they had the opportunity to learn more by I don't know opening up their textbooks or encyclopedias do you know what it is giant heavy things people used to sell at your front door yeah but now now learning is limitless right and you're not confined to the classroom anymore the world's knowledge is available at your fingertips and with that have come so many educational
applications, and with these applications it means everything's being redefined.
So from my understanding, these apps are not developed by the schools or education bureaus.
They are just third -party applications, and students can use it to complete exercises such as solving math problems or practicing English pronunciation, and teachers can correct assignments online and parents can check their child's learning progress it sounds quite convenient right you know everything can be done online but with you know this widespread adoption has also led to problems you know such as mandatory use unauthorized fees data breaches and excessive entertainment features and all of these are creating additional burdens for teachers students and also parents yeah and that's why and this is from News
Guangdong. Applications now must undergo strict registration before entering a school, so all the educational apps they have to go through an official online filing and registration via the Ministry of Education's website before being used in schools and this ensures that any recommended educational apps undergo a rigorous selection process teachers and schools cannot just you know unilaterally recommend applications so that's one of the restrictions and then also for any given category of app there have there has to be choices so at least three alternative educational apps have to be presented
for selection which is a good idea right you give some options and then choose the best ones.
And then the use of these apps can't be tied to the student's academic grades or evaluations and also in terms of privacy collect uh protection.
The collection of the information from the students should be obtained with the consent of course and the authorization of course of their parents or their guardians.
At the very beginning I ask myself is it really necessary to have so many different directives, regulation or articles telling people what to do.
And then I did a little research on all these educational apps.
And I realized that we are having different imaginations when it comes to educational apps, because we're not the targeted users.
We do not actually use them.
But if you take a closer look, it actually, you should said an app might help you to learn.
Guess what? That app might only help you learn in your primary stage.
When you're in your middle school stage, you need to go to another app because the database of the apps could be different.
And while you're in your primary school, a lot of different apps are actually good at doing different things.
For example, there are certain apps that allows you, they're really good at helping you take a picture of the textbook question you have, you have problem with, you do not know how solve that problem and you take a picture of the question no matter if the question is printed on your textbook or handwritten by your teacher or you're talking about it with your own or you're writing down on paper with your own not very sophisticated handwriting because that specific app is really good at recognition of handwritten questions.
It can help you with that and then there's another app helping you to practice your, for example, speaking English because it's good at recognizing your accent, whether or not your pronunciation is correct.
And also there's an app for your parents because that app has the function of helping your parents giving you or setting down a education plan or reviewing plan for your academic progress.
So there are really so many different apps.
Some apps are really good.
They would even allow you to interact with your classmates, talking to each other about certain, well, actually they're selecting data about whether or not this question is done wrongly by over 60 % of the students in the class, meaning that the teacher would have to maybe explain it again.
So these apps are for the teachers.
So there are really so many different apps.
And it's a good thing, in one sense, because it's helping different students with their different needs.
But definitely, there needs to be certain regulations, which is why this is not the first time such regulations come to place.
Yeah, this goes back to 2018, actually, when the Ministry of Education issued guidelines to address and rectify irregularities associated with educational apps for primary and secondary schools.
And then a year later in 2019, eight governmental departments jointly released the Opinions on Guiding the Orderly and Healthy Development of Educational Mobile Internet Applications.
And that marked the first comprehensive policy document to standardize educational apps here in the country.
And that document set clear standards for app approval processes, management norms, industry supervision was included in that as well.
So yeah, this isn't new, it goes back.
What's that, seven years or so.
Aside from this Zhuhai city, cities like Beijing and Dongguan have also implemented similar policies in recent years, emphasizing strict selection criteria for educational apps entering schools.
The core principle of strict selection and approval on these apps emphasizes thorough vetting before educational apps are introduced into schools and post adoption continuous monitoring is also very essential to actually regularly review and check the content provided by the apps and identify and address unauthorized charges, detect and remove falls or illegal advertisement and safeguard against data breaches.
About the charge, there's also another directive in this new notice that educational apps that are mandated for unified use as teaching or management tools must be provided to students free of charge.
Which means, yeah, this is quite necessary for I think both students and parents.
If they really need to use them, they need to use it for free.
Yes, this is very interesting.
We've already established that there are so many different choices out there for students and teachers and parents, but are they really enthusiastic about using it?
Do we see a lot of users in the Chinese market?
Yeah, these are widely used among Chinese students and teachers, and I guess that's part of the reason, isn't it, for the regulation is because they are so popular, and the apps range from helping students do their homework and engage in after -class exercises.
Some offer personalized tasks and AI -driven feedback based on the student's, perhaps individual weakness.
So if they're lacking somewhere in some subject, then it can be personalized, the AI feedback there.
And this helps teachers to monitor student progress.
Obviously it helps the students too.
It helps to manage their academic performances.
It can help them track grades.
So it's a big deal for the teachers, and the students, and the parents, and everyone involved in the child's education, how useful these tools can be.
One example is this quite famous app called zuo yue beng.
I've heard of it. Yeah, like most of us heard of it because it's got a lot of ads all around different apps actually.
Yeah so this app introduced learning activities such as Q &A's for your homework problems and exercises synced to your learning progress via their platform ever since a decade ago when it was first released.
Also according to research published on Statista as of November 2024, this app attracted nearly 100 million monthly active users.
Oh wow, that's pretty good.
Basically, more than 100 million children are using it to deal with their homework.
Yeah, actually China's educational technology market reached $130 billion in 2023 with the user base for various types of online learning platforms succeeding in 2003 to almost 350 million users and a 2024 China briefing article analyzed that such growth has failed by increasing internet penetration and enhance digital literacy.
When we were kids, we talk about how we like play video games, so we do not like to do homework or learn, but now a lot of these apps are making, doing homework or exercising or learning.
Like video games, they give you these little incentives when you do things right.
They give you this milestone kind of effect that showcase that you have, for example, finished 10 answers right, straight, and I've seen there is this app encouraging kids to engage in housework, like sweeping the floor, cooking, tidy their beddings and stuff, and each everyone, And every housework would allow them to light up this bubble.
And after the lighting up of, I don't know how many bubbles they gain, it's like getting different pieces of a puzzle.
Is that for kids or husbands?
I think husbands should be using.
Well, wives should be using that to incentive their husbands, too.
But yeah, the idea is that the apps are getting smarter and smarter.
They're encouraging kids to treat learning like playing games.
yeah and and that's why one of the reasons i mean i think there's many reasons why the market continues to grow here and these apps have become so popular and it could be partially due to the double reduction education policy from 2021 if you're not familiar with that that was a policy introduced to reduce both the volume of homework given to primary and junior high school students and also the time spent on extracurricular classes or after school private tutoring and And those are real challenges, right?
In the educational industry at that time.
So with these applications, you talked about it, didn't you, Yu Xun, about how these apps need to be free for the students to create a level playing field, right?
And that was one of the issues before, in many countries around the world, paying for tutoring, paying for institutions, that's not a level playing field.
But if you have free applications, it makes that quality of education available for everyone.
I think we've already briefly touched upon what are some potential problems or existing problems of these apps to their harming students, teachers and parents rights.
But exactly what are those problems?
Let's get a bit more specific.
One thing is that potential risks for cyber crimes technology opens doors for students but also increases the IT management required by school and districts.
That is set by Lightspeed CPO, Brooke Buck in a press release.
These kind of things that a lot of apps, of course, their target users are students and then they may be typing a lot of their personal information, maybe their learning progress the way that they are learning.
This actually could be their personal information And there could be some kind of leakage of their personal information.
That is also a security problem that may lead, that they may have when a lot of children are using these kind of educational apps.
And that is why one of the directive is listing that the parents should have the right to actually guarantee that the privacy and the information safety of their children too.
In 2021 the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the notice on apps that violate user rights and that involved 291 apps in total and notably 42 of those were from the education category and those apps were reported for issues including the illegal collection of personal information or forcing users to use targeted push notifications, excessive permission requests and then suspected deceptive practices aimed at misleading users as well.
It's not just educational apps of course, it's really any application right, that appears on a smartphone or a tablet or what have you.
These issues come up at those times and now they're coming up with these applications.
Yes but it when it happens to general apps it's kind of not as major issue as one they appear on educational apps because children are using exactly they do not have the ability or enough ability to differentiate between false information and the actual information they need to be very careful and very serious about there was a story a few years ago in the news from I think it was the United States maybe the UK I forget but a father woke up one morning checked his app on his phone and realized that he purchased a 40 ,000 dollar car the night before because his child his baby got his phone and was played
just pushing buttons and bought a car overnight.
He got his money back, by the way, that was the end of that story.
Yes and here on Roundtable, we've talked about kids using their parents' phone to play video games and charge in those games, spends thousands and tens and thousands of yuan and yes, they got their money back, but that is just one example of the lack of awareness and judgment of children.
And so when these apps, these educational apps, have these problems, definitely we should be extra careful.
And besides that, there is also the low quality content, excessive entertainment, false advertising, and also many of these apps focusing on only minor functions and that leads to students having to download multiple apps.
Yeah and within those apps some would be good and some wouldn't be great, right?
There was a meta -analysis study that was done where they sampled 36 studies focusing on educational applications designed to improve math and reading skills in children aged 3 to 9.
Now, overall, the findings were pretty good.
It was a meta -analysis, right?
So it was an overall study, combining the results of many different studies.
Overall, the result was positive for the applications, but it's important to note that the average positive effects hides the significant variation in app effectiveness.
This is what it said in the study.
So what they found was that the effects of the apps ranged from slightly negative to hugely positive.
That's a wide array of outcomes.
So you really have to explore very carefully the characteristics of the studies and of the applications to make sure you're getting the best ones available to you because not everyone is going to be an amazing one.
And there's one major factor that we didn't touch upon just yet because in today's day and age, artificial intelligence is something we have to talk about and thinking about something that can talk to your kids.
The way human being talk to them, it can be much more easy to accept and receive by kids when the appearance, the tone and the way it expresses itself is like a human being.
So are AI helping us more or hindering the learning process a bit more in the educational area?
Exactly. You know, when I was thinking about this issue, you know, the rapid rise of AI has significantly impacted the educational landscape, especially when these AIs are just so accessible right now, and they're so achievable.
You can just Baidu it whenever you want, and you can get a very powerful AI, just like DeepSeek, right, you know, so these kind of things will raise concerns about the potential misuse and also over -reliance on AI, particularly among students when they just can get these AI so easily?
One thing is that students may rely too heavily on AI -generated content, bypassing this essential learning process.
Teachers have reported receiving essays with suspiciously high quality language and identical phrases, indicating that students are just using AI too much. Yeah, but, so I remember when this was kicking off, and my teacher friends were talking about this, right?
You know, oh, my students are using AI for their homework, and it's hard to detect.
But now we've gotten to the stage where it's gotten a little easier to identify, because teachers, because the AI models will pump out the same kind of language, right?
And as a teacher, when you see that repeated from 30 different students, it gets easier to recognize now the next challenge coming I think for teachers is that the AIs are getting better exactly the AIs are getting better at sounding like a human being and I think that's one of the upcoming topics we have for roundtable but that's going to be an even bigger challenge for teachers in the future students relying too much on AI for their studies it's replacing your traditional learning processes will kids be learning as much and how will they be to identify whether it's human writing from the students
or whether it's simply AI.
But it's only for like language -related or literary related subjects, right?
For math or scientific questions, it's better?
Well, I don't know if you could say that it's better because if you are relying on the internet or on AI to give you the answers to the questions, well students are just simply skipping the process of actually learning how to solve the problems. So I don't know if you could call that better.
Yeah, just as you said at the beginning, some of these apps and even AI apps, they can just give you the answers right away after you give them the question.
You don't even know what is the process of dealing or solving all of these problems. You can just get the answer.
and then, okay, maybe it seems like the students finished all of the papers of problems but actually they were just spending maybe five minutes to upload all of their questions.
Yeah, and from a student's point of view, what are they gonna do?
What do you think they're gonna do?
Of course they're gonna do that, right?
How do you convince a young person, hey, you know what, it's better for you if you spend the two and a half hours to learn this process because then you'll know it forever.
Yeah, whatever, all my classmates are doing this in 30 seconds.
Do you think I'm going to be the one to sit and learn by myself?
That's a... maybe some students will, but it's a tough thing to deliver to students that message.
I mean, I don't know.
I actually am more optimistic about this because when I was a kid, instead of choosing different types of apps that I should be using in classrooms and at home, what my teachers do is, or what they did was to select the textbooks and some teachers would choose to because in the textbook exercising kind of textbook, there would be questions in front and the very last several pages would be the answers.
And some teachers would choose to tear away the answers so you don't get the answer, but some teachers would just leave it like that.
And as a student, you definitely would answer these questions and check out whether or not you got them.
Right. and still it's the same idea.
Well, students, especially after entering a certain stage, they understand the importance of learning.
And what we should do is to let them know there is this powerful tool out there.
Instead of asking the AI assistant the answer to your question, you should be asking it, how did you get there and how can I get there?
I understand your argument.
It's just, I wonder if we can evenly compare that because we're talking about two different times.
You're talking about a time when smartphones didn't exist, when you couldn't play a mobile game for four hours or just DoomScroll on your phone on social media apps, but that's the time that we're living in now though.
So what I mean is students have a lot of other things that can preoccupy their attention when maybe those preoccupations didn't exist back then?
Actually a report published on the Harvard Graduate School of Education in late 2024 suggest that generative AI usage on schoolwork are not all bad, but they landed on the results by asking questions to around 1 ,500 teens and young adults.
And they're saying, or actually a lot of them, a lot of the teenagers are saying that quote, not all kids use it to cheat in school.
And teens also wanted adults to know that they can be trusted.
And they say, use it in a good way.
That's what we do. And they would use it to ask questions that they do not want to ask parents or ask teachers but they kind of want to know the answer, they'll ask AI.
So, hold on, sorry to interrupt.
Who asked those questions?
Adults, what do you think the students are going to say?
Take those results with a grain of salt.
Sorry to interrupt you.
Yeah. I was thinking that actually, if the students are thinking this way, that's what the teachers, one, how they're gonna use these AIs.
Of course, they know that AI is there, right?
And they would like these AIs to be the kind of supportive tools for students to actually, actually, they could be very helpful for them to no matter as being creative or more efficient.
This could be very helpful when they can actually use this very wisely.
That we can agree on.
Yes. And in the future, it's inevitable for everyone to embrace artificial intelligence while they're studying or they're working and even some in their dating life, sometimes they're relying on AI to give them advices and arrange their dating process.
But, nevertheless, we are all figuring it out in our very own ways.
And Roundtable is here to observe all that progress.
