Author: Nicole

International students at Niagara College have launched a class action suit against the college. Affected students were in a four-month program that was to lead to a three year post-graduate work permit, but they allege that as their courses were almost entirely online, they were denied permits by the Canadian government. The class action represents about one hundred of the the approximate 500 students affected and the argument is that Niagara College should have known that the largely distance-learning based program did not meet Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s requirements for the awarding of these work visas.

Read more in The Star.

Ottawa Public Health recently released a study that shows that teenagers who spend two hours or more a day on social networking sites are significantly more likely to suffer from mental health issues, psychological distress and suicidal thoughts. The study involved analysing data captured in the 2013 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, in which 25% of respondents said they spent more than two hours a day on social media.

Read more on The Huffington Post.

It’s about education going to the birds….

Last week, Times Higher Education published a story online about birds that have terrorized universitites. There is an aggressive turkey that has been written up in seven police reports at the University of Michigan, the racist swan a the University of Warwick who attacks international students,  hawks that dive-bomb pedestrians on the grounds of New Mexico State University.

Life is a little perilous for people at these campuses, but the rest of us will get a good laugh out of the stories.

Read the article.

A resident of Manchester was recently sentenced to ten months in jail for sitting the Secure English Language Test for at least six other people who had no chance of passing. Lax identity checks had allowed Arsalan Ashraf to sit the exam for others… who would pay him the rather small fee of 20 GBP to do so. A spot check by immigration officials found him writing for a Chinese man.

On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported that the Canadian federal government’s commitment to doubling the number of international students studying in Canada by 2022 has been seriously undermined by failing to increase the bureaucrats needed to process the increase in visa applications. Processing times for study permits have increased by 30%, while processing time for temporary visas has doubled. This translates into would-be students having to wait much longer for their study permits than they would have to wait if they were applying to the UK or the United States, consequently rreducing Canada’s competitiveness.

Read the article.

We had a wonderful day and series of events on May 21st when Jeremy Harmer visited our Toronto offices. We invited teachers across Canada and the United States to send in any questions they would like Jeremy to answer, and we will slowly be posting video answers over the next six months or so.

The first post is an answer to Liet Hellwig, a teacher in Vancouver. Liet asked, “how do you deal with fossilised errors in your learners, especially recurrent errors that might prevent them from progressing to English levels necessary for their future?”  Here is Jeremy’s answer:

https://youtu.be/l1cz-8n9DGk