I know all about it. It's basically a scam, and you'll risk real jail time if you go.

Here was my submitted review to various websites.

- The HR department outright lies about the legality of employees' visa statuses to get them to work illegally. This has led to the imprisonment of around ten foreign Elan employees in just the last year.

- The Foreign Affairs Manager, Ryan Sun, had the gall to chastise me for immediately returning home after the Beijing police had informed me that I was not permitted to work under my current status (holding a Z visa receipt, but not yet a Z visa in my passport), and thus should not remain on the premises. I received explicit information in both English and Chinese (I speak both) from said officers explaining why my documentation was insufficient during this police inspection, and yet Mr. Ryan Sun still sought to reprimand me for being "unprofessional" because I obeyed police orders.

- The class materials were developed by Elan's incompetent Academic Director, Jonathan Hynes, and a rushed curricular development team that was clearly asleep at the wheel. Almost all of Elan's textbooks, quizzes, and other materials that centers required instructors to use were rife with vacuous drills, grammar misexplanations, misleading diagrams, lazy (and sometimes impossible) exercises, and even ridiculously many typos and grammatical errors.

- That same Academic Director also chose textbooks containing student-incomprehensible directions, created minute-to-minute schedules that were longer than students' class times, and made no real pacing or proofreading efforts in the materials he compiled. So, quizzes contained terms that were harder than those being assessed, entries mismatched parts of speech, and even made elementary lexical mistakes. He was essentially setting up students to fail.

-- There were as many as a dozen or more such errors or defects PER PAGE in many cases.

- The "native speaker" requirement was a blatant lie that kept qualified librarians from Anglophone nations from teaching, while the firm recruited English teachers from Western and Eastern Europe. This contradicts the very idea (promoted on their website) that they'll be "learning like native speakers," since students can't gain native-level proficiency from a non-natives, and the majority of them were no trained in any methodology that held any such promise for students.

- Upper management expected miracles out of a hat, without providing the appropriate authority, coordination, or directives to deliver them.

- Students were only ability-grouped if it was cost-effective. Otherwise, they were wangled into schedules by age and expected to make equal progress with those who were appropriately placed.

- Students routinely engaged in pushing matches, and sometimes even fistfights, in the lobby of the center where I worked.

- Time Education China Holdings' CEO spent an entire year-end dinner speech talking almost exclusively about how much money his business has made, and little to nothing about the efficacy of the programs he actually sells. This focus on profit over pedagogical quality trickles down to the centers, where talk about sales overrides talks about objectivity in measuring students' abilities or improvements in materials for their benefit.

- "Training" consisted of being told things everyone already knew by Academic "Director" Jonathan Hynes because he delayed the training by a month.

Here's a link to download all of their materials, in case you're interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yj8wup8yb68dbbd/Elan%20Teaching%20Materials.zip?dl=0