Canadian college builds app to help international students settle in

Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) is building an app to guide its increasing cohort of first-time international students to Canada with practical living information from housing to clothes, CBC reports.

Citing the “overwhelming” adjustment such students have to make as foreign students, the app will act alongside its website and orientation sessions to better relay information about life in campus and in Canada.

“We were looking for ways to provide students with some just-in-time information,” said Ashley Pinsent-Tobin, one of NSCC’s managers of international learning.

Nova Scotia Community College. Image via Azure/Mark Seymour/Wikimedia Commons.

Brazilian student Maria Cecilia Jorge Maciel, 38, applauds the move.

“When we are not from here, we don’t know what websites we should search (for information) and whether we can trust them,” she said.

“It really takes some time to get used to everything here, the new environment and everything we need to do. Anything that can help us is very useful.”

NSCC’s move comes as its international student cohort nearly tripled since three years ago, with 225 foreign students from 45 countries this year, representing two percent of the college’s full-time student body.

The app will be built by a third party in only English (NSCC’s medium of instruction) and estimated to cost $10,000 to develop and around $6,000 a year after that.

The annual cost may rise if the number of international students at NSCC continues to increase.

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