Village Media welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter from Barrie resident Jim Swales is about the education international students receive here in Canada.
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I wish to take issue with Georgian College and how they are delivering their courses to their students.
My wife and I provide a home to international students attending Georgian College and have done so for the past three years. My issue is specifically concerning our current student’s experience with Georgian College thus far and I don’t know if her experience is typical to all international and/or domestic students.
Here’s my point: These students pay a lot of money to attend Georgian College and they rightfully expect to benefit from the whole college experience, which includes in-class instruction from a live person and have a personal interaction with their teacher and other students. However, this is not what Georgian College is providing. Instead, they are continuing to deliver their programs online as they did during the pandemic.
This is not what the students have paid for. If students wanted an online education, they could have stayed home and saved a lot of money for their accommodations and other living expenses. This is the first week of our student’s program and all of her classes have been online and she has been told this will continue until at least October. This is very unfair to these students.
Another impact this has on students is that it interferes with their ability to take part-time employment because their online classes are continually changed on short notice. Since Sept. 6, every day our student’s class times have either been cancelled or have been rescheduled. This makes it impossible for her to make a commitment to a potential employer because she doesn’t know what her class schedule will be one day to next.
Students, especially international students, need part-time jobs to pay their living expenses. By allowing their teachers to deliver their programs online, Georgian College is doing a great disservice to its students.
Jim Swales
Barrie
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