A few questions for you to answer
- Would you be willing to pay less money for a
non-accredited degree that could seriously limit
your career prospects?
- Would you be willing to spend your money on a
non-accredited TESOL TEFL course that could also
limit your career prospects?
- Did you know that the price difference between
accredited and non-accredited is usually not that
great?
- Did you know that the price
difference between accredited and non-accredited
courses is normally due to
your accreditation fee that is then given straight to
the accrediting organisation?
In most cases, if you subtract the
accrediting fee from an accredited course's
total fee, you'll probably find that what you
are paying for tuition is less than
non-accredited courses.
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Accreditation defined
"To recognise an educational institution as maintaining standards that qualify graduates for admissions to higher or more specialised institutions or for professional practice." (Websters New Collegiate Dictionary)
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How does a training institution get accredited?
The training institutions that are accredited by the organisations included in the ATCC site have had to provide supporting evidence and material covering the following key points and the get them approved by the accrediting organisation's academic committee:
- Course aims and objectives
- Entry requirements
- Course syllabus
- Course plan
- Course material
- Course work expectations (lesson plans, essays or other types of written work)
- Assessment procedures
- Course tutor qualifications and experience
- Course assessor/moderator qualifications and experience
- Clerical procedures
- Site details and facilities
- Feedback and complaints procedure (internal and external)
The accrediting organisation's academic board or committee will then review the material and either approve or deny accreditation. Each accrediting organisation has it's own approval criteria.
The accreditation procedure usually takes a few months, requires a lot of work and insists that the training institution does a show-and-tell on every aspect of what it does.
Unless a training institution is serious about
its training intentions, the promises it wants to make to prospective students and really believes in quality, it will not bother getting accredited.
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What is accreditation and why is it important to you?
Accreditation is simply a mechanism that ensures 3rd party verification by experts of a course that you want to take. In other words, an expert independent body has checked through the main aspects of the course to ensure that it meets academic and usually non-academic requirements such as installations, procedures etc.
The main reason for accreditation is to demonstrate the academic credibility of an educational course of study.
All of the accrediting organisations mentioned in the ATCC site are accepted in their own right as credible educational institutions by government regulated bodies which means that the accreditors are also government accredited.
Why is this important? It shows you that the course operator is confident enough of the course offered that it is willing to expose it to expert academic scrutiny. Non-accredited course operators are not willing to take this chance. There may be many reasons why they don't want to do so, but at the end of it all, they don't want to show a government accredited organisation comprised of academic experts what they do.
Aside from the 3rd party course review, many employers now expect their entry level teachers to have an accredited qualification. Why? They want to be sure that the prospective teacher has had training that meets certain academic standards. The only way that they have to judge this is to see on your certificate that your qualification is officially accredited.
If you are serious about teaching English, then
take a course that is serious about training quality.
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What official TESOL TEFL accreditation
organisations are there?
The following fall into the classification of official accreditation organisations because they are in turn overseen by official government institutions:
(in alphabetical order)
- Cambridge Assessment;
- College of Teachers;
- Government accredited universities, colleges or community colleges;
- MEI-RELSA;
- New England Association of Schools and Colleges;
- Trinity College London.
The following shows the organisation that oversees the above-mentioned
organisations:
Organisation |
Overseen by |
|
Cambridge Assessment
|
British government
|
|
College of Teachers
|
British government
|
|
Government accredited universities, colleges or community
colleges
|
The government of the English speaking country that has given the educational
institution the power to award qualifications.
|
|
MEI-RELSA
|
Irish government
|
|
New England Association of Schools and Colleges
|
US government
|
|
Trinity College
|
British government
|
Your chances of getting the best jobs teaching English
abroad are almost guaranteed if you have an accredited
TESOL TEFL certificate.
As far as ATCC is aware, there are no other government overseen accreditation
organisations. If anyone knows of other TESOL TEFL accreditation organisations that are also overseen by the government of an English speaking country, please
email
ATCC with the details.
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