Trusted TEFL courses? Who can you trust?

What TEFL courses can you trust? I think this is a convoluted answer. 

Trust for what?

There definite scams out there which I will tell you about later, but then a large part of the industry is still telling lies or half-lies. 

Like what is your goal?

If you're goal is to just get a job or just get a certificate to check the box then many will deliver that goal. However, if you want to learn or if you want to know more about the industry and who may be operating the website then let's talk about the industry.

There are a lot of courses out there and I don't know how many maybe a hundred or more, but from my point of view it's a pretty scammy industry.

Who can you trust for TEFL courses? Reviews?

You might be looking for reviews of courses that you can trust. And you may go to a site like trustpilot.com thinking they must have "trustworthy" reviews but according to BBC that is not true.

Amazon also has a problem. It has been reported that half of its reviews may be fake and as many as 200,000,000 on other sites.

Fake review site that claims to have "trusted" TEFL course reviews

Here is a pic of a search result.

It is known that TrustedTEFLreviews.com is run by a scam artist. And if you are a scam artist then I guess step #1 is to fool the consumer. Do you think adding the word "trust" to your brand name might help?

The scammer calling scam again 

Trusted TEFL reviews is owned by the same man who created ACTEFLC (TEFL online pro's owner).

On Trusted TEFL reviews he calls himself Mia Williams and writes fake reviews on his competition and positive reviews on his other site called TEFL online pro (the so-called winner of the "Teacher's choice award"). 

He uses fake id's, fake comments, fake awards, all to hide his real identity which is known for running a similar scam in the past.

Read more about trusted TEFL reviews and TEFL online pro.

How do you spot fake reviews?

Review the reviewer.

That's one way. Here are some others:

1. Investigate the site
2. Investigate the auther
3. Read beyond the headline
4. Investigate the supporting links
5. Check your bias

Learn more about how to spot fake TEFL reviews and news.

The status quo with TEFL courses

The status quo in the TEFL course industry will tell you to take an accredited, 100-120 hour course that's internationally recognized, but why? Now I've taught English in China, Korea and Taiwan which started back in 2004 and I can say that's a really superficial statement that's often made by the people selling those courses.

Accreditation

Accreditation in TEFL ranges from fake accreditation (example: ACTEFLC) to government accreditation. The fake accreditations are set up by the companies themselves wearing a different mask and a fancy sounding acronym name like ACTEFLC. It's easy for them to fit in if they copy other organizations out there and that's what they do.

It's a copycat industry.

Now some of the fancier accreditations claim to be accredited by government organizations, but there is no one accreditation for TEFL courses and these accreditations are often not related to TEFL. 

100, 120 or 142.76 hour courses

I made the last one up as a jokeˆˆ, but there are various other so-called "hour" courses. Online it is known that these are fake hours. People often complete these so-called 120 hour courses in a few days. I completed one in 8 hours.

So online those "hours"are fake and the reason why people are telling you to take a 120 or 100 hour course is largely built around the fact that the industry models a course called CELTA. But when I say model I mean often only on the surface.

So CELTA is or was (it has changed) a course that lasted 4 weeks and was 120 hours in a classroom. CELTA is affiliated with Cambridge university so it's more "internationally recognized".

But know these things.

1. TEFL accreditation can be fake and despite what you have read or may read it does not guarantee quality.
2. TEFL course hours are pseudo fake hours (online anyways) and they can be fudged in class too. As I took a short in class course that gave me what they said was a so-called 60 hours certificate (in 2 days), but it didn't say that on the certificate.
3. The term internationally recognized TEFL certification doesn't mean anything concrete. It's just a marketing term.

So what do you do?

Do your research. Make the best decision you can and learn more aboutTEFL course scams.

I built some courses and this site around my experience teaching in Asia. I made the training simple and practical because learning how to teach was very difficult for me and I did not find the courses I took to be useful at all.

So instead of feeding you loads of jargon and theory which goes in one ear and out the other. My goal is to show you how to teach. And I started off with no experience and was a pretty poor teacher.

I created materials and courses that are actually practical. The course I took before teaching in Taiwan (my first country) gave me a certificate that I tried to use to get my boss to pay me more, but he knew experience (and my lack of it at the time) is what matters not some certificate.

And when I got in the class I realized that I didn't learn much of anything from that course that was helping me to teach kids. Teaching is a balancing act. You've got to balance the lesson and deliver it in such a way to help your students learn. It also has to be fun otherwise the kids attention will be gone. But if there is no structure then fun can become chaos and it doesn't guarantee that they are learning.

Then you have troublemakers or just kids that can be difficult so what do you do? 

Learn more about ESLinsider's course for teaching kids in Asia because roughly 80% of the jobs there are for teaching kids.

1. There's no fake accreditation
2. There are no fake hours
3. And ESLinsider doesn't claim to be "internationally recognized" like McDonald's is.