Are online TEFL courses recognised and accredited? Today I’ll answer this question in detail. I trust that you will find this info useful.
What is the significance of accreditation?
Accreditation means that the courses offered by the training organisation are subjected to rigorous external scrutiny. This ensures that the training you receive is of the highest quality and is exactly what a TEFL hopeful requires to find job as an English teacher abroad.
What are the advantages of online TEFL training?
Online training is convenient and flexible and has proven its worth in recent, uncertain times. Earning your TEFL certification online is therefore possible if you work full-time, attend school full-time, have other time-consuming responsibilities or are unable to attend a course in-person. It can also allow you to work at your own speed, around your own schedule.
Online TEFL classes are reasonably priced. Course costs vary according to the hours of study but you should expect to pay no more than $500 for a course that lasts around 120 hours. Schools and businesses abroad prefer their teachers to be TEFL certified and you can fulfil this requirement easily by being certified online.
A TEFL certification allows you to broaden your teaching opportunities, you can choose to teach online, in a classroom or specialise teaching certain student demographics. Specialising your qualification to attune your qualification to fields such as young learners or business professionals can help you aim for a higher starting salary making online TEFL certification well worth it!
What are the disadvantages of online training?
There is no global regulatory body in place to oversee the quality or content of online courses. The absence of regulation means that anyone may design, promote, and sell a TEFL course online. This means that inevitably there are hundreds of courses to select from, many of which are of poor quality, with some even set-up to take advantage of ill-informed potential learners, promising high-quality instruction at rock-bottom prices!
The increasing demand for TEFL courses world-wide has encouraged this trend and unscrupulous organisations are setting up shop all over the internet.
The in-house propaganda for many of these organisations tell you that at the conclusion of your course you’ll be assured a job in some far-off, exotic place and is the cause for many people to sign up. Fresh ‘graduates’ of non-accredited online courses however, are frequently confronted with reality when their ‘qualification’ leads nowhere.
Online vs in-class?
Some companies promote in-class training, highlighting that in this setting you will be surrounded by like-minded people, whereas online you are more likely to be provided with a stack of dry PDFs to slog through. This is inaccurate however and genuine, accredited training organisations strive to create virtual classrooms and communities where online learning can still be engaging and communal.
Online sounds fine, but who can I trust?
Ask yourself (and the internet) the following questions:
- Who is the course provider?
- Is the qualification offered by the provider accredited? If so, by whom?
- What does the country you are wanting to work in require of its TEFL teachers?
- Does this country recognise the qualification you are considering?
The course provider that you select must be registered as a training or teaching organisation, it should not merely be a trading name with a business number.
What will accreditation do for me?
The accreditation of the training organisation is the assurance you have that the provider you have selected adheres to certain government controlled qualifying standards. It is not dependent on whether the class is delivered in-class or online. In Australia for example, these are the standards according to the Australian Skills and Quality Authority and they would grant the provider their accreditation. The UK’s Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation does this in the United Kingdom whereas the Distance Education Accrediting Commission is one of the United States Department of Education’s approved accrediting agencies.
To guarantee that standards don’t drop, good accrediting organisations review and moderate the services provided by the training and teaching organisations on a regular basis. The Australian, UK and US authorities are generally acknowledged all over the world but to be sure you will need to research your desired destination to ensure that the course you have selected is recognised.
Following these steps will help ensure that you undertake an accredited course of instruction and receive a recognised qualification, regardless if it is delivered online or in-class.
Accreditation can be seen as a sort of protection. It is a governmental guarantee that you’re not being taken advantage of by a dodgy TEFL course provider and that you’re not wasting your hard-earned money on a low-quality, untrustworthy or unrecognised course.
It’s also a safeguard for your future employers who want to know that they’re hiring instructors who have received high-quality training. Finally, it serves to protect your pupils who have the right to demand a highly trained English language instructor.
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