Category: Innovation

International students: Bringing a world of good to workplaces

“The combination of loyalty and hard work means that international students can make a great addition to a business”

We all know just how valuable international students can be to a country’s economy. Take Australia, for example. It’s the country’s fourth-largest export, worth close to AU$36 billion.

But it’s not just the economy – or education providers – who benefit from the diverse group of students who call Australia home. As graduations approach, the number of international student graduates looking to find employment in Australia is set to grow. There’s a real opportunity for employers to diversify and grow thanks to the global perspective that international students can bring.

At Cohort Go, we recently added three excellent international students to our engineering team, joining our very diverse workforce that hails from 11 countries. Here are my thoughts on why including international students in graduate hiring plans is a smart move for any business.

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Meet Murphey: The dog helping international students learn maths

“Research has shown that a school dog can impact positively on learning and behaviour”

My beautiful cockapoo, Murphy McGrath, comes to work with me once a week to help look after and settle the international students in Learning Support. 

As he is a ‘Learning Dog’, he takes three roles during the day: meet and greet the children as they arrive for their one to one support lessons for maths, provide dog-grooming as an extracurricular activity for the children which they love to help out with, and to sit with the school counsellor, Laura Denmead, as he is a good listener and will create a calming and positive environment, making it easier for the children to talk about their problems.

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Five Reasons Why Swedes are the World’s Best Non-Native English Speakers

“Swedes are eager to reach people outside of their country, and they benefit economically and linguistically from this”

As Sweden aims to internationalise its higher education sector and attract more foreign talent, one of its advantages is the country’s high English proficiency.

For the fourth time in the past eight years, Sweden ranks number one on the 2018 EF English Proficiency Index . The EF EPI is the largest global study of English skills based on test data from 1.3 million adults who took the EF Standard English Test  in 2017.

Since EF is a Swedish company, we asked 100 of our Swedish colleagues why they think Sweden has been so successful with English language education. Here’s what they told us:
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What the world has to learn from Singapore’s education system

“There is more than meets the eye in the detailed, strategic outlay of Singapore’s education system”

While governments across the globe engage in discussions about reforms in their respective state education policies, Singapore seems to have gone a step ahead to execute reform actions in its academic establishments.

Singapore evolved from a third world country to becoming one of the top-choices for expats. It has gone from strength to strength ever since its independence and has unsurpassed ratings for the quality of its schools.
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How Swansea University remains internationally ambitious in challenging times

“Internationalisation via strategic partnerships will allow us to extend our global reach whatever the outcome of Brexit”

Since our foundation in 1920, Swansea University has embraced opportunities to think globally, growing and maintaining partnerships that enhance and support our research, teaching and student recruitment ambitions. But to say that universities are operating in uncertain times is no less true for being a cliché.

The numbers of international students entering the UK have been flatlining since 2012 when the government removed the two- year post-study work visa, followed by further changes in 2015, as the government began cutting immigration targets and tightening up rules in a number of areas, including academic progression and savings. At the same time, competition has got tougher as the market has grown in the USA, Canada and Australia, and HEIs in parts of Europe like the Netherlands and Germany have begun teaching courses through the medium of English.
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How international students can benefit from online learning

“Sometimes learning can be a long and a tedious journey…online learning makes that journey interesting and fun”

CEO of internship & training platform Internshala Sarvesh Agrawal discusses the benefits of online learning over traditional classroom-based learning.

Many students across the globe looking for internship and job opportunities end up getting rejected, and the reason behind the rejection is often of a lack of relevant skills. Employers actively seek to hire students who have skills and knowledge that could be put to the test and be an asset to the company. One possible so to the problem is online learning.
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We need a genuine global marketplace to share innovations in education

“Great innovations are happening all over the world and the best ones, once validated, could spread fast if we are open to them”

Innovations in education are taking root all over the world – but they don’t always spread, because the education sector remains stubbornly local, argues Saku Tuominen, Creative Director of HundrED, a project to share innovative projects and best practises in K-12 education with the world for free.

The world is global. The world of education is not.

If we agree that the purpose of school is to help kids flourish in life, no matter what happens – or don’t totally disagree with it – we can easily see that there are massive challenges facing our current education system. Possibly the biggest of them all is the increasing amount of uncertainty.
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