A multilingual course search and student review website is set to be launched by mid-December, aiming to become the Trip Advisor of the international language school industry.
Created by ICEF – which has significant global reach given its track record in the industry – Coursefinders allows students to search for and directly contact language schools around the world, leaving star-rated reviews and comments about their experience afterwards.
The site will officially launch once it has 250 school-users with completed profiles– currently 180 schools are taking part in the beta phase. The German, Spanish and Portuguese versions will be rolled out before the end of the year and ICEF hopes to have a half million to a million unique visitors by the end of 2014.
Schools are charged €3 for every lead the site generates which they can book directly or pass on to their partner agents
Despite concerns from agencies that the venture could threaten business, ICEF maintains the site streamlines interaction between the “three pillars” of the industry: students, schools and agents.
“This is part of ICEF’s, and the market’s progression,” said Ross Holmes, ICEF Business Development Manager for online products. “ICEF is strong amongst schools and agencies but we were neglecting the students. Coursefinders gives us the perfect tool to bring them all together.”
Schools are charged €3 for every lead the site generates which they can book directly or pass on to their partner agents. Students can also opt to be contacted directly by two ICEF certified agent in their area.
“These are things that are already going on in the industry – we’re just facilitating it and making it very easy for them to do it in a single click,” added Holmes.
Similar to Trip Advisor, all the content on the site is crowdsourced (based on student feedback) and rankings depend on student reviews. Students can like photos, vote on reviews and interact with their peers in forums and discussion groups.
In order to ensure leads are from engaged students looking to study in the short to medium-term, students log in through either Facebook or Google+ and answer a four-stage questionnaire before sending their enquiry to up to 10 schools.
Holmes says that incorporating social media profiles gives schools access to more personal data about the student and, because the site is based on reviews, more security.
“We don’t want people to move accounts after leaving reviews so we saw that social media gives an extra element of trust,” he said.
Badges for national organisations including Languages Canada and English Australia can be displayed on the schools’ profiles, linking to pages explaining the benefits of studying at a school with the association’s accreditation.
Taking part in the pilot phase, ACE English Malta General Manager Alex Fenech says the website has “all the ingredients to deliver what it promises”.
“We don’t want people to move accounts after leaving reviews so we saw that social media gives an extra element of trust”
“As a general policy we do not participate in websites which request payments upfront and take such requests with a pinch of salt since very rarely do any bookings materialise,” he commented.
“In this case, seeing who is behind the site, our attitude towards it was very different.”
Schools who volunteered for the beta test completed their profiles and promoted it to their former students in exchange for 50 free leads. About 7,500 basic profiles have already been created for schools to log in and complete for free once the site is made live.
These language schools will be notified of a student’s interest, once the site is live, and can decide if they wish to pay for the lead.
After the language course website is fully functional, the company plans to use it as a template to expand into other sectors including boarding schools, hotel schools and higher education.