1. Correctness of course name, features, schedule and price information has been confirmed by provider
2. 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.

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Chinese language training, Masters programs, or other courses, the information provided was either too positive, out of date, or insufficient.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

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.

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.

Since 2007, Totuba has been conducting research and development activities in the education space. We’ve been looking at ways to make assignment research and referencing easier and more tolerable for students, how to make an intelligent online word processor tailored to the needs of students, and worked at developing standards for globally defining education and its various characteristics. At totuba.com, we’re constantly looking at better ways for students to search and compare courses to make the best decisions possible, and develop valuable data to help learning providers improve their services.

Totuba Labs is the new home for discussion of Totuba’s research and development activities. The blog is edited by Dr. Carsten Ullrich, who will be regularly reporting on our research and development activities.

Carsten has over ten years experience in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a focus on web-based learning. As a researcher at Saarland University and the German Research Center for AI (DFKI), he worked on international semantic web projects, and was a founding member of the ActiveMath group. Carsten is also a researcher at the e-learning lab of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. There, he’s involved in the European Project ROLE and works on mobile learning and active language learning research.

We will be reporting more of our ‘behind the scenes’ work via Totuba Labs, and look forward to creating community dialogue on a number of issues relating to innovation in the education sector.

Gaining entry to a reputable senior high school is seen to pave a child’s path to a good university, itself critical to achieve or sustain the family’s societal and financial goals. This places significant pressure on children to excel in the country’s senior high school entrance examinations.

To read the full article, please follow this link to The China Education Blog.

Municipal governments’ latest efforts to reduce the study pressure placed on the nation’s youngest students comes in the wake of a tragic suspected suicide of an 11-year old girl in Shanghai, who fell to her death from a school window on the first day of semester.  Pressure within classrooms and at home are major psychological stress factors for young Chinese.

To view the full article, please follow this link to the China Education Blog.

Halfway through his postgraduate studies at the University of Sydney, Edison Meng believes the pursuit of a quality international education is too important for Chinese families to forego or postpone, particularly after many had saved for years in aid of that goal. ”Money is usually set aside by the family when a student is going abroad, and I believe there would be only rare cases of Chinese international students dropping out of universities due to the effects of the financial crisis,” Mr. Meng said.

To view the full article, please follow this link to the China Education Blog.

It is not only intense study pressure that hurts creativity, but a system of learning that is built largely upon one-way lecturing and rote learning. In a recent speech about the country’s forthcoming 12-year plan for education, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao indicated that there must be a drastic change to this system if China is to capitalise on its rampant growth since the late 1970s. Addressing the issue directly, Wen said future education reform must prompt teachers to not only instill, but inspire, students to greatness.

To view the full article, please follow this link to the China Education Blog.