2009-10-01 | iMandarin first Chinese language provider to obtain Totuba Verified seal
One of the main goals of totuba.com, to improve quality and transparency of education search, now has a proper name – Totuba Verified. Course providers can obtain this quality seal when complying with the following terms:
- Correctness of course name, features, schedule and price information has been confirmed by provider
- Course information accuracy is regularly re-confirmed by provider
Totuba Verified seal
After completing a thorough verification of their course data and tuition fees, iMandarin, a Shanghai-based Chinese language provider with several branches throughout China, is the first Chinese language provider to obtain the prestigious Totuba quality seal. We hereby convey our thanks to the iMandarin management team for their cooperation, and we encourage other course providers to follow suit.
2009-09-24 | Totuba Launches 360° Course Reviews
How it all started
Fostering the standardisation, internationalisation and promotion of China’s education sector are chief goals for Totuba.
Interested in further study in China, our founders began browsing hundreds of websites to find suitable options. They were dismayed to consistently find uniform course marketing messages, and quickly became discouraged. Regardless of whether it was one-on-one Chinese language training, Masters programs, or other courses, the information provided was either too positive, out of date, or insufficient. Friends and colleagues reported similar issues when searching for courses in China and other countries. This frustration inspired us to set up www.totuba.com, a service that now allows foreigners to search, compare and review courses in China, and it further encouraged us to begin writing editorial reviews of course providers: The Totuba 360° Course Review.
What is the Totuba 360° Course Review?
Totuba 360° Course Review aims to look behind the curtains of a course provider’s marketing message. Most websites browsed in the process of setting up www.totuba.com conveyed little about whether courses offered were a good fit for a prospective student. Totuba 360° Course Review adapts a system from organisational psychology, and gets those around a course interviewed to form a circular – hence 360° – feedback, giving prospective students a more accurate picture of whether a provider and course suits their personal needs.
Totuba 360° Course Review methodology
- Handpick a provider according to the target profile from a pool that includes well established, start-up, in-class, online and blended learning providers
- Check the provider’s website and obtain contact details
- Make an appointment with a course consultant
- Obtain provider and course introductions from the provider’s main office
- Attend an assessment to find out whether, and on which level, the student fits a course
- Attend a trial course session (usually a 60 minute class)
- Inspect and assess the course curriculum
- Interview a selection of teachers, administrative staff and management
- Have a selection of students inspect the school from angles that help determine the overall quality of the course, namely: the place, the people, the learning, and the outcomes
- Write and publish the 360° Course Review
Editorial rating
As the conclusion of a 360° Course Review, an editorial rating is assigned, reflecting the overall impression the provider made upon the reviewer during the review process. The rating is visualised as a sequence of degree characters as indicated in the image below.
Example: 4-degree editorial rating
The rating carries the following meaning with respect to the overall impression of the provider on the reviewer:
- 1 degree: poor
- 2 degrees: below average
- 3 degrees: good
- 4 degrees: very good
- 5 degrees: excellent
2009-08-06 | Totuba.com goes higher with over 100 Peking University courses
2009-07-31 | Totuba Labs: “Presentation at the UDS-SJTU Joint Research Lab for Language Technology”
A new article titled “Presentation at the UDS-SJTU Joint Research Lab for Language Technology” has been posted at Totuba Labs. The following is an excerpt:
At Totuba we are looking at many ways to automatically extract information about courses from the Web. However, we are faced with many challenges, as there is lack of standardisation and open source libraries that we can draw data from. Prof. Uszkoreit suggested to more deeply investigate how people encode addresses, pricing information, etc, not only in the language course domain, but in other domains, too, to enlarge the amount of examples we can use for training. That feedback was well received and has been included in our range of investigations already in progress…
To view the full article, please follow this link to Totuba Labs.
2009-07-24 | China Education Blog: “Classroom Discipline: Challenges for Chinese Policymakers”
A new article titled “Chinese education demand steady amid global downturn” has been posted at The China Education Blog. The following is an excerpt:
Teachers are under immense pressure, with large classes, a need to ensure good grade averages for the reputation of the school, and an education system that demands a certain style of teaching. This style of teaching, in turn, generally fails to engage students in a meaningful way, creating a ripe environment for distraction and misbehaviour – resulting in disciplinary action being required.
To view the full article, please follow this link to the China Education Blog.
