This organization is the strangest lot I have worked with during my entire tenure on the English as a Second Language circuit.
I dare not go into their history in detail to avoid protracting the points.
The institute does not comprise such a large organization but does instruct about 1600 students, most of whom are in fact Shanghai Ocean University students who major in business information systems and management administration.
The English arm works with the students intensively during their first year and less intensively during their sophomore year.
One mystery revolves why the institute routinely advertises without honestly telling people how much their salaries, housing, transportation, and air entitlement allowances might be during recruiting. These entitlements are better than average in several ways.
The second mystery revolves why the director and his assistant encourage visiting staff members to live in the center of the city of Shanghai rather than living in perfectly adequate housing inside the Nanhui district where the branch campus was located during six previous years and why it somehow makes sense for visiting staffmembers to waste three to four hours daily commuting from center city when a van from the previous neighborhood could have them at work in twenty-five minutes. It's strange that after six full years of operation that phasing out residence in center city has not occurred.
The third mystery involves the weak communication between the English arm, the local national arm, Shanghai Ocean University, and the University of Tasmania. The four groups are unable to share information so that the English arm is aware of requirements that the three other arms might levy on the same student population.
The fourth mystery includes the veil of secrecy in how the students are selected for the special program. By the way comments about how the students have chosen to be in the program, have been surveyed about their desire to be in the program, and how 97% of them secure jobs after completing the program come up. Yet, the students seem to be no better- or worse-motivated than students at other tertiary institutions and employment statistics conflict diametrically with both international and domestic media reports about appalling post-graduation employment rates in China.
The fifth mystery is why after working for two full years in the program and now beginning a third year that when the school year has begun that we never have a full visiting staff complement when the pay and benefits package exceeds that offered by many Chinese tertiary institutions. Those employed end up taking up this teaching slack and until this school year have always been required to perform this work gratis.
The sixth mystery is why the local national teaching arm and the University of Tasmania are totally unwilling to provide any information regarding the business curricular that the students will partipate in during their second through fourth years in the program so that the English arm can tailor its delivery to prepare the students for these curricula which are delivered almost exclusively in English. It took me two full years in the program to come to understand why what I have been doing is nearly pointless other than to prepare students for general conversation and general writing in English.
Although the English arm is very well-organized and although there is largely a cordial working relationship, I do not recommend considering this organization as a workplace. There is no social life between staffmembers. There is no affordable and comfortable housing on the new inconveniently-located campus, and there is virtually no shopping available accessible to the new campus. There is no university-provided transportation between the new campus and the district center where fully adequate housing and shopping are available and there is no forthcoming nature on the parts of the local national teaching arm, the Shanghai Ocean University host, or the University of Tasmania.
They can promote, brag, and be impressed by their "results" until they are blue in the face, but until some communication occurs, nothing is actually being accomplshed there. The turnover rate on the parts of visiting staffmembers attests to that, too. It is not at all unusual for staff members to break their contracts at midyear. As of this moment we have one unfilled position which has been open all semester and we have an unexpected contract breach so that unless a miracle occurs, we will be two staff members short when classes resume on February 16.
The visiting staff members are largely unavailable to give a hand for student activities outside of the regular school day and those who live accessibly to the university are pressured to take up that slack, too. Their only benefit is not having to put up with the long commute. In fact the obsession with catching the bus detracts from the quality of instruction.
Further, the administration of the institute encourages participation in such things as chopsticks festivals and Christmas events in the center of the city only to find the visiting staff members placed as the center of the entertainment to generate laughter among the Chinese audiences.
Lastly and most importantly, after working very hard to take students through life skills and skills-based education and carefully evaluating their performances, they are still very poorly equipped to step into the academic curricula in business information systems and management administration. The visiting teaching staff is led to believe that they have performed well because they have successfully guided these students through these life skiills and skills-based activities, but these experiences do not appreciably help them to absorb PowerPoint presentations in the fields they will study during their sophomore through senior years. We see a distinct degradation in student attitude once they move into the sophomore year and we continue to work with them in transition to their fields of study. They resist and ignore the continuance of listening, speaking, reading, and writing tasks in favor of appearing solely to maintain a pulse and blood pressure during their presence and study PowerPoint or other materials during these sessions when not napping.