"I don't recommend the teaching English online course offer through IOA TEFL"

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International Open Academy review, written by Kate.

I don’t recommend the teaching English online course offer through IOA TEFL.

I have a few reasons why I wouldn’t recommend you take their course. Asides from finding it difficult to find work after taking the course, and most of the things promised never materializing, the course just doesn’t do a good enough job of doing what it should do, i.e. teach you how to teach English. I should have listened to the negative comments voiced in the reviews, but I was taken in by the mouth-watering low cost of the course.

My main beef with the course is that it was way too easy and way too light on content.

It’s structured so that you read a short piece of text and then take a multiple-choice quiz. This is repeated until you have completed the course. I completed the whole course in one afternoon, and there is no possible way how anyone can expect to be a knowledgeable teacher after learning for so little time. If I had taken my time more, by taking notes along the way, I suppose I could have stretched my course completion time to two days (at most) It’s a bit like playing Mario Cart and then expecting to be able to get in a real car and go driving down the highway. It just isn’t realistic. Also, I understand that any text-based course will inevitably have a few typing mistakes here and there, but the spelling errors in this course were numerous.

There hasn’t been any help with finding work and the jobs I have applied to haven’t taken my IOA TEFL certificate seriously. If you want to save money big by taking this course then that’s your choice. Just don’t expect any service and expect to be at the bottom of the pile when applying for any teaching English job.

I will soldier on with my job applications, but it’s looking more and more realistic that I will need to pay for another TEFL course and with a different company. Next time I won’t make the mistake of choosing the cheapest one being advertised.