About the IATC
Education agents play a significant role in counselling and referring students to international education providers. Their primary representatives in this role are student counsellors. ICEF has designed the IATC as a means of raising the standard of quality and the professionalism of student counsellors.
We developed the IATC based on the input of 769 education agents from 113 countries and 437 education institutions from 78 countries. We then analysed this input to identify the key features of the student counsellor’s role, irrespective of the destination country, and designed the IATC to train student counsellors in these features.
The IATC instructs the student counsellor in fundamental knowledge and functional skills. The student counsellor gains a "big picture" perspective of researching and marketing destination countries, and recruiting students for their education institutions and courses. This provides a conceptual framework with which to build detailed knowledge of a destination country, its education system and institutions, and its immigration processes.
The IATC is based on the following definition of the role of a student counsellor:
The student counsellor connects the people involved in international education, linking students, parents, education providers, and travel and accommodation providers to each other in order to facilitate study in another country.
Core services to students are:
- Provide information on destination countries, e.g., lifestyle, costs
- Provide information on education options, courses, and pathways
- Provide counselling to students to ensure the most appropriate course selection
- Process enrolment applications
- Process visa applications.
Core services to education providers are:
- Recruit suitable students
- Process student applications
- Provide market information
- Market and promote education providers.
In the IATC, key concepts are reinforced and expanded across lessons. In each lesson they are linked to related concepts, which both aids memory retention and promotes acquisition of wider cognitive connections. By the end of the course, the student counsellor should possess a broad conceptual framework within which to understand their role in international education.
The IATC has three Course Units (A). Each unit is divided into Lessons (A.1), each lesson is divided into Pages (A.1.1), and each page may have a number of segments. Information is cross-referenced with hyperlinks.
The course units contain three types of questions/exercises:
Focus Questions:
These are at the beginning of each lesson and prepare the student for the information contained in it.
Extension Questions:
These occur throughout the content and assist in applying the knowledge gained from the course. They are a practical checklist to ensure that student counsellors are always able to give accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date information to prospective students, especially with regard to specific destination countries.
Activities:
These are learning tools at the end of each page, allowing student counsellors to test and reinforce essential information before continuing to the next one.