Tefl.NET Forums

Hi,

My name is Alex. I qualified last year as a Qualified Primary School Teacher through the PGCE route at a university in England.

I am considering doing TEFL, and currently live abroad. On-Site courses are quite difficult to find, and therefore I am considering taking an online course. With my prior experience within the classroom and qualified teacher status, is it okay to select an online TEFL course over an on-site TEFL course?

In terms of my aspirations, I hope to teach English in France, when I decide that TEFL is right for me.

Thanks

Alex

If you’re smart-thinking, you should take your TEFL certification online:

https://trustedteflreviews.com/2019/05/ ... on-online/

That is terrible advice, most decent employers in Europe will not accept online certificates.

Safari992 wrote: ↑12 Aug 2019, 12:44 That is terrible advice, most decent employers in Europe will not accept online certificates.

Got to agree with you there Saf

Absolute hogwash.

I've been teaching English for over seven years and I took my TEFL online - I now teach for one of the largest schools in Wien, and the majority of the other teachers are also online TEFL qualified.

It's 2019: the era of the onsite (residential) TEFL is coming to an end.

Mia.

I have done both on-site and online. While I have a lot of gripes with online learning in general, a well-designed and well executed online course in TEFL can be quite valuable since much of the learning is head work based on reading, watching (e.g., videos or live presentations and/or actions) and doing written activities (lesson plans, response to queries, tests). A few online courses have interactive class lessons with all students participating in a chat room. This is not the same as in-person, but it can be useful if the teachers are up to it, as were the ones in the pronunciation-teaching course i took. Nevertheless, exchange of ideas online just cannot match a live, in-person exchange. in addition, and probably the most import thing, TEFL training with-out class-room experience (practice and feedback) is inadequate for any basic course.

If an onsite course does not have observed practice teaching, don't take it unless you have a special reason (e.g., it is a specialized course). Also, your at least part of your teaching should be with real students and not fellow TEFL trainees. You should get detailed feedback on how you performed, including both strengths and weaknesses.

Just because a course is (entirely) online does not mean there is no class-room teaching and feedback. Some online courses require that you video-tape a lesson, which they then critique. This is not the same as in-person, but it comes close and does provide you with this critical element of your training.

The vast majority who take online certs and then go on to do an in person Celta or equivelent say that there's no way online courses compare to what you get from an in person class with teaching practice. Even the blended Celta is considered a poor relation of the onsite courses. Onsite classes are definitely not coming to an end, if anything the amount of dodgy online certs and the hacks pushing fake reviews will lead to a clampdown on anything gained online.

What you claim could quite well be true, but do you have any data to support it?

CELTA isn't even recognized in Asia.

Celta isn't widely known in Asia compared to more developed markets, but saying it isn't recognized is just false, and kind of worrying seeing as you're pitching yourself as an authority on TEFL. It's recognized by any of the decent schools and pretty well known in Vietnam - from what I can see some of the biggest recruiters in Vietnam explicitly say online certs aren't acceptable. Jobs are so plentiful in Asia that you can get by with an online cert, I know I did until I eventually did the Celta.

@kdammers, no, I'm just a regular person, just going off what I read online, talking to people and my own experience. Talk to any recruiter at decent schools, they'll tell you that there's a big difference between people they've hired that do in person classes and online classes.

@Safari992: I've worked at schools and universities in Asia for over a decade and taken online and extensive (much more than CELTS provides) on-site training. While I think that observation of actual teaching is really important, I have hired and worked with people who have gotten online training (sometimes the online training includes reviewing of taped demo lessons), and I haven't seen a categorical big difference between CELTA and the best online products. But, like you, I don't have any formal comparisons, which is why I asked if You had hard data. Cheers.