I can't disagree more. Traditional classrooms and textbooks are designed to make educational institutions economical to operate. The textbook standardizes the class to the point where an intelligent undergraduate could run it. The reason students need to commit to several months of learning in advance is to amortize the costs of running a physical school.

Everyone moves at the same pace because you only have X lectures per week and the material is canned. Huge classes have evolved to make the system inexpensive to operate. So where is the focus on learning? What about student convenience, or the ability to move at your own pace? Why not let students explore their interests and take more responsibility for their courses? The competing economic model is the gym. But you can't run an educational business that way if everyone has to proceed at the same pace.

Online learning isn't going to displace traditional universities but it will change the point of going to class, because paying top dollar for huge lectures will seem like a waste of time and money. It's also silly to say it will never dominate the top X schools because you don't know what those schools will look like. Full disclosure: I run an educational company that teaches how to learn Chinese. We have more students than are studying mandarin at any university in the United States. But you can't compare the approaches because the business model is different and what students get out of it is totally different too.

Easier explanation: education is a pyramid and the majority of the students are at the bottom. Freshman courses are the biggest market opportunity and the space in the market most open to adopting non-traditional study methods.

Stick with it. The fact that you've already started puts you seriously ahead of the game.

At risk of sounding spammish, I'm running a company from Beijing that specializes in online Chinese learning at http://popupchinese.com. We are pretty exposed to conditions in the local market and are still seeing a lot of growth in small and mid-sized businesses in northern China. These are the smart innovative companies. In contrast, it's the export-oriented manufacturing sector down south that are having a really hard time.

The job market is definitely a lot softer in Beijing than it used to be, but the problems are mostly hitting people who are monolingual and unskilled. Chinese university graduates are having an especially really rough time these days (you can get a fulltime hire for about $500 a month). People who are genuinely fluent are doing pretty well. We're certainly hiring (on the off chance anyone reading is fluent in mandarin or cantonese and a native english speaker and is looking for work in Beijing please get in touch).

Offices?

His first step should be getting rid of those so he can keep the staff under constant surveillance, and ideally packed four or six to a table to maximize team communication and learning. Follow agile development methods and experiment with seating arrangements before locking things down and setting up the camera so you can monitor from home if needed.

Make sure none of them have keys to the office and set up a punchcard machine. Link punctuality to pay and make sure they work weekends once in a while too (a measure of team devotion). I'd also recommend keeping the washroom locked and having a signout sheet for the key so you can monitor whether they are wasting time or drinking too much coffee. Hover when possible.