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You’ve likely been invited to use live chat when shopping online or seen companies offering training for their own staff or clients using webinars. In the field of higher education, these tools have also become increasingly popular among universities in countries such as the US, Australia, and the UK. Early adopters of webinars and live chat in the higher education sector have been using them for different purposes, such as training library users, providing IT support, tracing alumni, conducting joint study courses, marketing study programmes, and recruiting (international) students, etc. Their systematic use for student recruitment is, nevertheless, a very recent phenomenon and the level of professionalization varies across institutions and even individual academic programmes and departments.
In light of the above, ACA, the Brenn-White Group and StudyPortals have jointly produced a 14-page Guide to using live chat and webinars to recruit international students for higher education institutions (HEIs) and related agencies that are venturing into interactive web-based marketing and recruitment. The Guide starts with the basics of webinars and ‘live chat’, which are not merely sharing videos online or instant messaging, followed by a list of key pointers to the successful use of such tools for international student recruitment. It is one of the results of the project EduCoach – Personalised Online Advising for Study in Europe Orientation, funded by the European Union’s Erasmus Mundus Programme. Authors of the guide are: Queenie Lam, Academic Cooperation Association; Megan Brenn-White, The Brenn-White Group, and Sissy Böttcher, StudyPortals. Among others, the authors would like to thank Domus Academy, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Bocconi University for sharing their first-hand experiences for the production of this guide. To download the Guide for free, please follow this link.
Additionally, to celebrate the launch of this new service, StudyPortals is offering 10 free webinars including support, promotion and feedback for ACA members. You can directly contact StudyPortals to make use of this offer at
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