Free and Open-Source Gaokao Math Course: An Experiment in Educational Equity

A Returning Creator: Building a Free Gaokao Math Course in One Year

In an educational landscape saturated with anxiety-driven marketing and eye-watering tutoring fees, a Bilibili creator known as "Vice Class Monitor" (副班长) — dormant for six years — has returned with a bold promise: to produce a genuinely competitive gaokao math course in one year, completely free and fully open-source.

"Genuinely competitive" means exactly what it sounds like — the course won't flinch in comparison to any paid program on the market, even those charging thousands per semester. Every lesson, every worked example, every pedagogical approach is the product of years of teaching experience, refined one sentence and one problem at a time. And all of it will be freely available.

What's striking is just how thoroughgoing "free" really is here: not only are the videos free, but so are the handouts, supplementary materials, and slide decks — and even the teacher's reference lesson plans are fully open-sourced. Anyone can use them personally, share them with classmates, or hand them to a teacher as a reference. The only restriction is a single rule: no reselling or commercial use.

Confronting Reality: The Vast Gap in Educational Resources

The attention this course has attracted isn't just about the word "free" — it's because it cuts directly to the pain point of deeply unequal educational resource distribution.

The creator doesn't shy away from describing the reality facing high school students today. In small cities and county towns, teacher shortages and outdated methods leave students with no choice but to grind through sheer time — from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., exhausted, with painfully little to show for it.

In major cities, the schedule may look more relaxed, but the battlefield has simply shifted to after-school tutoring. The costs are staggering: a single subject can run several thousand yuan per semester, tens of thousands per year is the norm, and six-figure annual tutoring bills aren't unheard of. Families who can afford it grit their teeth and pay up; those who can't are left to stew in anxiety.

More infuriating still is the phenomenon of some in-school teachers deliberately holding back key material in class, saving it for their own private tutoring sessions. The urban-rural divide, resource disparities between schools, the chaotic private tutoring industry, and the pervasive anxiety it generates — these are the realities this free course is trying to push back against.

A Three-Year Roadmap: From Gaokao Math to Full Subject Coverage

The creator has laid out a clear, phased plan for the project — a signal that this is long-term thinking, not a fleeting impulse.

Year One focuses entirely on gaokao math from start to finish, covering the first review round for fundamentals, the second round of topic-specific drills, and pre-exam intensive prep, released in sequence. The strategy is to "start with what moves the needle most and hurts the most" — no fluff, each video covering exactly one concept, roughly two videos per week at a steady pace.

Year Two introduces synchronized lessons for students in their first and second years of high school, along with bridging content, so younger students can build the right conceptual foundations from the start and avoid "paying the debt painfully" by the time they reach their final year.

Year Three and beyond: if capacity allows, the creator plans to recruit like-minded collaborators and expand coverage to Chinese, English, physics, chemistry, history, and other subjects — and eventually even into non-exam domains like music, drawing, calligraphy, and physical education.

Underpinning all of this is a single four-character core idea: educational equity (教育公平). The creator has also settled on a project slogan — "Grow Upward" (向上生长) — meaning that no matter where you come from or where your grades stand, you deserve the right to grow.

Why Open-Source the Lesson Plans? A Win for Everyone

For many people, the instinctive reaction to releasing lesson plans and slides without reservation is: "Aren't you afraid of losing out?" The creator's answer flips that assumption entirely: this is a win for everyone.

His logic is clear:

• Students get access to quality content without worrying about expensive tutoring fees;
• Teachers gain a systematic reference for lesson planning, making prep less burdensome;
• Parents see their financial load lightened;
• The creator himself benefits from user feedback and criticism that help sharpen the course over time.

This is, in essence, classic open-source community thinking — "one person's reach is limited, but if everyone adds a little, the whole thing becomes something different." When you flag an error in the comments, every student who comes after you takes a slightly shorter path. When you pass the materials to a classmate, the flame of knowledge spreads a little further. The creator invokes the phrase "a single spark can start a prairie fire" to describe this model of collaborative knowledge-sharing.

How It Stays Alive: Transparent Monetization and a Social Enterprise Vision

Beyond the idealism, the creator also speaks candidly about the reality of sustaining himself — "I have to eat too. Without a material foundation, all ideals are empty talk."

His solution is deliberately restrained: at the end of each phase, topic materials will be bundled into a "premium collection" that supporters can purchase for roughly "the cost of one or two bubble teas a month," keeping the project financially viable.

The key is transparency: the creator explicitly commits that the paid collection contains exactly the same content as the freely released materials — no hidden extras, just cleaner formatting and added personal commentary, saving users the time of organizing things themselves. Anyone who wants to go to the comments section, download the raw files, and compile their own version is completely free to do so. The core content will never be gated.

The creator even articulates a longer-term vision: if the project ever generates a surplus, he hopes to follow a social enterprise model similar to Fat Donglai (胖东来) or DeepSeek — prioritizing value creation for society, earning only enough to keep operations running, and reinvesting any remaining proceeds into hiring talent and producing more free courses.

An Educational Equity Experiment Worth Watching

The creator is clear-eyed about the difficulty ahead: "Achieving educational equity is as hard as climbing to the sky… It may take five, ten, twenty years — or it may never be fully realized in my lifetime." But he sums up his stance in a single phrase: "The achievement doesn't have to be mine, but it must include me."

In a world where high-quality educational resources remain acutely scarce, this "free + open-source + community collaboration" model is, at its core, a transplant of the open-source ethos from software into basic education. It may not bridge the educational divide overnight — but it at least offers a path that escapes the grip of anxiety-driven marketing and returns the focus to the content itself.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, this experiment — flying the banner of "Grow Upward" — is worth following closely.