Friend Karen Richardson has reached out to the teacher development community to help out a colleague. She sent me the following email (also posted on our Facebook page):
“A colleague has asked me whether I would be her assessor/tutor for her Teaching Practice. She intends to take a cert TESOL course run by intesol. It’s a 150 hour online course that claims to be equivalent to the Trinity certTESOL and the CELTA. http://www.intesolinternational.com/cert-ES-TESOL.shtml
I’ve never heard of …this course before and so am wondering whether it is really as serious as it claims to be. Can anyone offer any advice please?”
I have to admit that I’ve never heard of them (not necessarily a bad thing), so I can’t really comment. But perhaps one of our readers can…
I haven’t heard of this course, either, but that doesn’t mean much since I’m new to the TEFL world. I do know, however, that the distance learning company I used said that there wasn’t really such a thing as accreditation for an online course. This seems to be backed up by the information here:
http://www.teaching-esl-to-adults.com/accredited-tefl.html
As they state, quality varies widely and maybe you’ll find a course that is of high quality even without being “accredited” while the so-called accredited course may not be so fabulous.
As an aside, I just want to add that I found that, as with most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it and I put a lot of work into my online course and came out of it with a lot of useful material that I created on my own. I think this course would probably be the same.