The Language Business

Education UK

Not resting, not asleep, not pining for the fjords. Education UK is dead.

This is from a British Council record of a meeting in May 2002 intended to reassure the ELT sector:

We explained that the site was part of the Prime Minister's Initiative and intended to spearhead a major boost in the number of international students recruited to the UK... the government and the British Council are spending millions of pounds promoting the Education UK brand (and the website associated with it)...

Because our English in Britain stood in the way, the British Council offered to "alleviate" the problem of "paying twice" by reducing the first year fee for the schools. That bribe was unhelpful, but of course you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear, and Education UK was one hell of a sow's ear.

Leading the pack was this man, Dr Neil Kemp. In a circular to the entire UK ELT sector in January 2002 (follow link for the complete document) he wrote as follows:

After a rigorous selection procedure, the British Council entered into a contractual partnership with a consortium led by Hotcourses to develop the Education UK website and associated databases.  The other consortium members are UCAS, CSU and Yahoo. 

That was unhelpful too. Kemp didn't mention the "exclusive" agreement his organisation had signed with my company in respect of providing exactly the same service for the sector, and of course it wasn't easy for us to be credible competition when up against the BC, UCAS, CSU and Yahoo - not to mention the Prime Minister and the government's millions in promotional cash. It turned out, however, that the "consortium led by Hotcourses" was a £100 company ("Education Websites Ltd") whose shareholders were Hotcourses Ltd, UCAS Enterprises Ltd and CSU Ltd - the latter pair risking all of £20 in this venture. And Yahoo? Ask yourself first whether Yahoo would be an investor in a £100 company. Actually Yahoo (hard to believe today but the clear leaders in search at the time) were nowhere - not shareholders, not named in the agreement, nothing. Kemp made it up.

Before the Freedom of Information Act came into effect, the contract was hurriedly changed to exclude the profit-sharing clause Kemp negotiated on behalf of the British Council, and reassigned to another company, Sheffield Data Ltd. The original company, Education Websites Ltd, was renamed Remone Ltd, and an application made to have this renamed company i.e. Remone Ltd struck from the register at Companies House. Nevertheless the FOI answer from the British Council given to my enquiry as to whether the original contract had been changed was that there had been no change to the contract. Presumably they hoped that their burial job had worked. Oh dear.

All of those involved on the Council side did well: OBEs and promotions all round for the cheats and liars and a knighthood for the boss. And a fortune for the Hotcourses shareholders just before the entire Education UK edifice was finally destroyed and buried. Taxpayers? Millions down the drain. Students? What students. Schools? dropped away fast because it never worked. Education UK did much more harm than good. A monumental waste of money now lying in an unmarked grave.

 

CoursePricer - Instant Quotations

Many schools now have online booking systems, some of which provide quotations. But nothing touches CoursePricer. It is fast, flexible and really powerful. Schools can build in their fee structures whether its fixed price and fixed dates or continuous enrolment with multiple start dates, graduated discounts, summer seasons etc., with optional and mandatory extras, accommodation, airport transfers etc. We launched this last week and we have around 70 schools and colleges using it already. Click here to view a selection.

What's different about CoursePricer?

• It sets new standards for speed.
• It works for an infinite range of packages, options, course structures and fees.
• Quotes can be emailed and sent to phones anywhere using SMS.
• It can be installed anywhere.

Once set up on English in Britain you can easily install that calculator icon on your own site (I've put one here to illustrate the point), agent site, association site etc. where it will work with the same data at the same speed, whether link, iframe or javascript popup.

 

 

 

 

 

English in Britain wins BYTA Award

A distinguished panel of judges, including leaders and experts in the industry, journalists and academics, has chosen English in Britain from a strong entry as the 2015 winner in the Best Support Service category.

English in Britain 2015

Happy New Year to all readers! This is our latest promotional video for English in Britain. It's more about style and image than substance but we like it anyway.

On a Happier Note

International Education Connect Ltd has been nominated for a British Youth Travel Award in the Best Support Service category. The winners in each category will be announced on December 4th. We're dead chuffed.

Remember the "Million Dollar Homepage"?

It's now ten years since young Alex Tew's idea for the Million Dollar Homepage took shape and we decided to support it. His slogan at the time was "Own a piece of Internet history" and despite the hype I think that was pretty fair. I would never have thought about it had it not been for a surge in mainly north American visitors overnight from that source, so I presume the anniversary made the news channels over there. I believe a fair number of the links on that page are now dead, but Alex evidently lives on - the man behind CALM.

English in Britain Guide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published for the first time last year we record a milestone: last night we passed 25,000 downloads. We've now given the guide its own website at EnglishinBritain.guide where you can browse the guide online. There's also a public counter there.

Seeing is believing

If you are going to go somewhere, or thinking of going somewhere for a while, you like to know what things look like. And we live in a visual age, when people are as likely to send a "selfie" or other picture to friends and family, whether directly or through social media, as send an email or, gulp, a letter as once we did. So we have announced this evening another arm to our English in Britain media suite - a gallery to show students the people, places, and activities they could encounter. English in Britain subscribers can upload unlimited pictures to their albums, and have videos embedded, and I hope we will build a great library here.

The English in Britain Gallery will be found at EnglishinBritain.gallery

App Matters

Please, dear reader, would you consider reviewing our App? Two kind people have (unprompted) given us some encouragement and 5 stars, and these are helpful, but a few more would be very welcome. Just click on the screenshot above and then where the arrow points and off you go.

I'm new to app publishing (APP-rentice?), so at the risk of boring the experienced app-people let me report on a few things that I have noticed.

1. Everything takes longer. You make a change on a website and the change is instant. Make a change to an app (which I have to ask my developers to do anyway) and Google Play is pretty quick, a couple of hours maybe, but the Appstore takes a week. Yes, a week, even for the most minor change. We published version 1.05 on Google a week ago, but as I write it's not in the Appstore yet.

2. The app is attributed publicly to the developer rather than the publisher. Thus ours says Pipe and Piper rather than International Education Connect because they are the ones with the app store accounts. So a slight miff factor, and a bit odd, but not a problem.

3. The download numbers given are a nonsense. OK you can't get them from Apple, but it took a couple of weeks for Google to reach 10 when the developers and I between us had probably downloaded the app more times than that in the first week as we were doing upgrades to 1.01, 1.02 etc.

On the plus side you can go back to an app after a few days and open the same page of data you left when you last used it, and of course it's fast. These days the website is so fast it hardly matters, but I mention it anyway.

Your support is much appreciated.

 

Keeping Busy

Months of work and we now have a new English in Britain website and an app for iOS and Android mobile devices. 

The new website is more than a facelift. We have had a programme re-write and added new functionality so that students and agents can register and keep records of "favourite" schools and courses.

The app has a related but nevertheless slightly different design and functionality. Both items are very fast, but the app is superfast. And while I half expected the launch to push our Guide into the background, in fact downloads have accelerated quite sharply.

What's the point of three products? Three routes to school data are better than one, and there are different strokes for different folks. All three - the responsive design website, the iOS and Android app, and the Guide (a PDF offering the user 1000 hyperlinks to data direct from their desktops) - break new ground in the promotion of British ELT.