The Asahi Shimbun carried a short blurb that is encouraging news for ALTs in Akita. The Akita school board says it will hire hire it's ALTs as full-time instructors.

Something light for the end of Golden Week.

If you've been following the developments of neo-Nova since its collapse, then The Japan Times story about Nova instructors and staff who are still out of a job six months after G.communication took over is old news.

G.communication's craptacular rebirth of Nova continues.

Apparently, G.communications has an "ace" up its sleeve. After posting the article about G.communication's plan for success, the Asahi ran ran a similar story a few days later but with a slight difference in the details.

A story in the Fuji Sankei Business i says that G.communication has turned things around and will be back in the black in May.

The writing is on the wall. G.communication's attempts at reviving Nova's corpse have been an unmitigated disaster. The Yukan Fuji writes that Nova is turning out to be a sucking chest wound that threatens to take down the entire G.communication group. As the article points out, G.communication has lost at least ¥1.7 billion since taking over Nova. Here's a translation of the article.

The Mainichi Shimbun has an article looking back on METI's role in Nova's failure. Here's a translation of the article.

This is so good it makes you think it's an April Fool's joke. G.communication is upset that other schools have been poaching their students!

What Japan Thinks has a translation of a survey on online English lessons conducted by JR Tokai Research.

So far, it appears that g.communication has botched the rebirth of Nova. No matter how much lipstick they try and put on it, neo-Nova still looks like a pig. I did a little digging in the forums and came up with a few choice nuggets from ex_sensei that illustrate how bad things are going for g.com. The picture he paints makes the old Nova look good by comparison.

The union was at it again today, hounding g.communication over its refusal to rehire former Nova employees.

In addition to the "hiring drive" for new instructors, g.education recently announced that franchises for its neo-Nova schools are now on sale.

Here's the announcement:

Browsing the Nova/g.education website, I came across a press release dated February 18 [PDF in Japanese] in response to the accusation that g.education had reneged on its promise to hire all former Nova staff and instructors.

Just a little addendum to my previous post on Nova opening a school on the campus of Aichi Gakuin university.

The General Union is still nipping at g.education's heels over the raw deal instructors were given when they were effectively fired by not having their contracts renewed. UPDATED 03/18

As far as I know, with the demise of Nova, Gaba is the only publicly traded English conversation school in Japan, and finding information on how schools are doing is close to impossible.

Strange but true, g.education announced plans to open a Nova school on the campus of Aichi Gakuin University in April.

G.com is on a "hiring drive" and is looking for monkeys instructors to work for peanuts. According to the g.education/Nova website, they are looking to hire 20 part-time instructors.

Here it is in case it disappears in the future:

After a look at the declining fortunes of the foreign language market, the Yano Research Institute has published a the results of its survey [PDF in Japanese] on the impact Nova's failure had on the foreign language sector in Japan.