The department has IN students! Who knew!

[Lilith-Palmer]

There is a group of stakeholders that didn't get a look in during development. International students! The department has an entire directorate devoted to finding international students and settling them into NSW schools.

After having a chat with Milton, an admissions manager from this area, I found that they are already referring potential students to the school finder, and that there is only one or two crucial pieces of information needed to make it comprehensive for their area.

• does a school take student visas?
• does a school take temporary visas?

Most schools take temporary visas - they can basically only refuse of they are already full. But only 100 schools regularly take student visas, and maybe another 300 take them intermittently.

The question is - could we incorporate this information into our baby the school finder

[techieshark]

Awesome. Yeah, seems totally doable.

Questions that come to mind (immediately plus after googling 'NSW education international students':

• Is this something the older tool did? Perhaps we could look at how the info has been presented previously.

• DE International already has a search tool which means they have data. What data do they have, and how hard would it be to incorporate it into our dataset? That might be a question for @reekypete.

• Do international students have to pay tuition? (It appears so, and makes sense since they wouldn't have paid taxes presumably.) Tuition fees are found in the appropriate application -- here's an example:

• DE International has a quite useful website with way more information than we'll include in the school finder, so we should probably link to it. Here's what I found on their site regarding finding a school:

Contact us to discuss your intended address in NSW so we can advise which high schools are available to you. You can also view high schools on this map (not a complete list) or use the school finder tool.

• @Lilith-Palmer it'd be worth pointing out to them that their link to the school finder tool is broken (it includes an "example.com" in the address). See above or their site.

• What do other parents think when they hear about international students coming? Given what appears to be a rise in xenophobia and nationalism around the world, it might be worth exploring this. If parents have concerns or fears we may be able to include just enough information to help ease those. For instance, I first thought "wow, is Australia paying to educate foreign students" but actually there are tuition fees listed in the application form; a simple first pass might be adding "International students accepted here" to school finder but we might also want to say "Find tuition and other information on this website" partly for the sake of the potential IN students, and partly for the sake of Aus parents.

[techieshark]

Wow my screenshots always end up being enormous. It's much smaller on my screen.

[Lilith-Palmer]

No, the other tool did not do this. The DE international team currently use both the school finder, and their own search tool, to compile information for potential students.

We need to do some investigative work, but yes, they handle their own data and seemed interested in giving us access for this purpose. I don't know what system or format it is in though.

Excellent point made re listing links to tuition info etc. Happy to link back to the DE site, but they are linking to us, so it's a bit of a round robin sitch. Oh well.

[techieshark]

Yeah links from us to them and them to us (the 'round robin sitch') should be fine and actually logical since the link to them is of use to anyone who didn't come from there but might be interested (imagine you're a parent finding a school for you kid, but your niece or nephew lives abroad -- you might see that your school supports international students and then you'd want a link to learn more about that).

So I think TODO at this point is:

• [ ] Lilith - research data and use cases / user research

Can I take Peter and Peter off the assignees list for now to clarify who's working on this?

[Lilith-Palmer]

Sounds like a plan

[techieshark]

Update: Lilith did some good new research on this. Sounds like further discussions are needed and the challenges are complex (like, the Great Firewall of China blocks google maps, among other things). Will follow up on that soon.