I have just been contacted by our computer science department, and they are looking for a way to attract students from India and China to our college in Norway. They didn't say why they wanted to focus on those two countries, and not some other countries in Asia or any other country for that matter. But I guess the reason might be that both India and China are huge countries with an amazing amount of people, and both countries are among the top countries in the world when it comes to research and development within the area of computer science.
Attracting students from those two countries all the way to Norway will probably be a boost to our computer science department. Personally, I think that students from India and/or China will have a tremendous effect on both current students and teachers.
Now, the question I am currently working on, is how to attract students from Inda and China to Norway and our computer science department.
I have found five possible ways to market our computer courses:
- AdWords (narrowing it to only showing the ads in India and China)
- Baidu (using Pay Per Click)
- Facebook (target China and India)
- Craigslist
- Websites and discussion forums
There are probably many similar websites to India Education, but so far I haven't found any.
I think AdWords might work, a lot of people use Google, and I think we can use english in order to attract the students. They have to understand english in order to study at our college anyway. I am not so sure about Baidu, it seems that close to everything is in chinese, and I am not sure if we should translate a website into chinese or a Pay Per Click campaign into chinese. I have to do some more research when it comes to this search engine, because if a lot of people are using it, it might be worth the time and the cost.
I also find Facebook interesting. I am not sure if many people in India and China are using Facebook. I have read in several blogs that
Facebook has been blocked for people in China. But hopefully, this only happened
a few times in the past.
I am more sceptical to Craigslist. I have heard that for the United States, Craigslist is close to perfect when it comes to specific topics (like buying and selling used stuff). But when it comes to India and China, I am not sure if people are using it at all, and if they are using it, how likely is it that we will find our students on Craigslist?
Finally, I think that finding websites and discussion forums related to education in China and India would be awesome. So far, I have only located two. That's
India Education and
Transit Abroad. I am not sure how good they are.
At the moment, I am not sure what we are going to do. All I know is that I will keep you updated.
