The IOL Club English programme and our China sister site at iolc.org.cn are running a joint pilot through April-June 2026: a single mentor pool serves both cohorts, so a student joining via English chat gets the same walkthrough style as one joining via WhatsApp.
Concretely, three things change for the next three months:
- Shared past-problem worksheets. The same problem set anchors each week’s session, so cross-cohort discussion is possible.
- Bilingual office hours. One office hour per week alternates English/Chinese so any mentor can take any question.
- Unified contest calendar. Both sites now read from the same upstream calendar tracked at ioling.org.
This is not a merger – English programme runs on its own cadence with its own application flow. It is a back-end coordination so resources stop being duplicated. If you joined via WhatsApp already, no action needed. If you are joining now, the WhatsApp add still routes you to the English programme.
Pilot ends end of June; we will publish a short review then.
Filed underChina Cohort
This site is IOL Club, an independent community guide to the International Linguistics Olympiad operated by Hanlin Education. We are not affiliated with the IOL Board or with any national linguistics olympiad. Official rules, host-city announcements, and problem packets are published at ioling.org. Our editors verify every claim against ioling.org and correct confirmed errors within 7 working days.
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