Under the strategic context of the country's vigorous promotion of the "Artificial Intelligence +" initiative, Alibaba's AI flagship application, Quark, announced on August 28 the launch of an "Education Program" targeting nearly 20 million teachers and 50 million college students nationwide: through long-term, stable free benefits and exclusive discounts, enabling teachers and students to easily access AI tools with low barriers.
Currently, in-service teachers and college students can search for "Quark Education Program" within the Quark App, complete identity verification (teachers with a teacher qualification certificate, students with information from the China Higher Education Student Information Verification System), and then receive a free three-month membership, covering the three core products "AI Membership," "Quark Cloud Storage," and "Quark Scanner." At the same time, they can renew at an discounted price of 39.9 yuan per year, equivalent to one twentieth of the original price.
Teachers can additionally receive a free one-year membership from September 8 to 12, including AI Membership, Cloud Storage Membership, and Scanner Membership. This mechanism will be continued annually in the future, forming a long-term and stable educational support system.
The program aims to significantly reduce the barriers and costs for teachers and students to use AI. According to calculations, if teachers and students individually subscribe to commonly used digital tools such as AI documents, audio transcription, scanning, and cloud storage, the annual cost would be nearly 1,000 yuan.
With the continuous penetration of artificial intelligence technology into the education sector, many educational enterprises have begun to focus on campus scenarios. For example, iFLYTEK has established deep cooperation with schools in scenarios such as Mandarin evaluation and oral English exams by leveraging its intelligent voice technology. Education technology companies like ZuoYeBang and YuanDongXue have focused on professional scenarios, starting from learning assistance and providing AI correction functions for learning support.
Different from function-based products or those entering from a single scenario, Quark has adopted a "combination of tools" model this time, aiming to meet the comprehensive needs of students from previewing lessons, doing homework, writing papers, and job hunting, as well as teachers' lesson preparation, teaching, and answering questions. This is consistent with the requirements mentioned in the recent "Artificial Intelligence +" policy issued by the State Council, which calls for "building an intelligent situational interactive learning model and promoting more flexible and resource-rich self-learning methods."
Industry data shows that the market size of AI tools for education in China is expected to exceed 80 billion yuan by 2025, but the payment rate is still relatively low. By offering large-scale free benefits and discounts, as well as collaboration among multiple products, Quark aims to cover the entire teaching and learning scenarios, essentially cultivating user habits and capturing the "entry point" of AI learning tools. This strategy is similar to the "hundred billion subsidy" logic in the e-commerce industry, focusing more on long-term ecological value rather than short-term transaction conversion.
