Review by NM, March 27, 2013

Overall Rating
Course Content
Practice Teaching
Quality of Feedback
Lesson Plan Guidance
Instructor Competency
Job Placement
Facilities/Resources

I would not recommend this course. Although I learned a lot, it was only because I got lucky. I got lucky and had an amazing on-site instructor, but that may not be the case with all on-site instructors. I also got lucky in having great peers.
On the other hand, I had a TEFL advisor who pushed me into paying for the course early, because there were “already almost 10 students signed up” for the onsite course in LA and if I wanted to get into the course with 2 others, I needed to pay for it in January. When I got to the onsite course there were only 2 other people there i.e. we were nowhere near capacity. If I had waited until February, as I had planned, I would have gotten the course at a discounted rate. I was told by another student in the LA course that this very thing also happened to her and her TEFL advisor was a different person, so I am guessing that this is a tactic they use to get you to sign up before the course is discounted. My TEFL advisor also told me that all three of us (myself and the two people I signed up with) had to buy the course book. Luckily I was the only one who bought it, because all of the reading was free online (and ironically, riddled with errors in the print, ebook and online versions—how can you trust a place to teach you to teach English when they don’t even edit their textbooks?!) To me that was highly unprofessional and it was obvious that instead of trying to help me, this woman was just trying to sell me as much as she could. I brought my complaints to TEFL Institute and they said they were looking into these things, but that was three weeks ago. I thought that this woman was taking my complaints seriously, but then she didn’t get back to me until I emailed her again. She said that she was sorry for my troubles, but didn’t take any action that lead me to believe that she actually cared.
As for the instructor, he may have been knowledgeable, but his lack of participation in the course didn’t demonstrate at all what his impressive resume did. I was not impressed by our his feedback and the tardiness with which it was given. In the final week of the course, I only had feedback and grades on three out of fifteen assignments. It would have been very helpful for us to have had feedback on our lesson plans, since for many students it was the first time they had to write one. How can we improve without feedback? How can we keep from making mistakes when our instructor hasn’t told us what they are and at this point we’ve now had to turn in multiple lesson plans? When he finally started grading our assignments, some comments had nothing to do with what we had written and some of them were as simple as a “Yup” or a “Three pointer no net.” Other lesson plans were not given any comments just an arbitrary grade in the grade book.
There was a definite lack of leadership in this course. For the most part, it seemed as if there was no online instructor and I got more out of hearing from other students, since he was never around. This very instructor also did not show up to the Chicago onsite course for two days and no one was able to get a hold of him. The students in the online course were aware of this and a lot of us thought that something terrible must have happened to the instructor since he hadn’t been online or graded any assignments in over a week. I called student services to see what would happen to the online portion of the course. I accidently called the TEFL Institute info number and a woman told me that the instructor was being replaced, but she would email later to let me know for sure. She never did. Eventually, the instructor came back online as if nothing had happened and didn’t offer any explanations for his absence. I eventually stopped asking him questions, because for the most part, students never received answers or the instructor couldn’t answer questions about the course.
This led me to contact Student Services which was awful. They hardly ever answer the phone and when they do, they don’t get back to you or answer any of your questions in a timely manner. Most of the time I was shuffled around to other people, who then took a long amount of time to get back to me. Since the online portion of the course was so unorganized (nothing on the calendar, due dates never specified and an instructor who was never online and had no knowledge of the workings of TEFL Institute), it was necessary to contact Student Services more than once. I was told by other students that they had the same experience.
Thanks to my on-site instructor, I got a lot out of this course, since she covered so much, however she is not a regular instructor with TEFL Institute, so I cannot recommend this course.
The idea of TEFL Institute is great, but the reality, in my experience, was not as great and the only great parts were dependent upon chance. I had 5 amazing days with an incredible onsite instructor, but five weeks of uncertainty, disorganization and basically no online instructor.