Is ESLinsider legit?

Is ESLinsider Legit? ESLinsider review, submitted by Todd.

Is ESLinsider legit? The course contains very poor video quality.

I kind of feel bad writing this review, because I think ESLinsider are trying to build up its TEFL course online presence and I don’t want to be someone who comes in the way of that. But, this is a TEFL course review and I need to be objective here.

At first, I had my eye on the ITTT TEFL certification online course (which I later took, btw, and which I was satisfied with). Their website looked professional and there were a lot of good things written about the program. But then, my attention was drawn to eslinsider.com and an article written by its founder, Ian Leahy. In the article, he argues the point that ITTT TEFL shouldn’t be trusted. The reasoning behind this, according to Ian Leahy, is because of their affiliate marketing strategy and because they also clandestinely run xxxxxxxxxx.xxx. Ian Leahy claims that because ITTT TEFL secretly run xxxxxxxxx.xxx, they were able to award themselves a TEFL course award.

How was I to know any better? I just took Ian Leahy for his word and enrolled in his course instead.

I thought, at the time, that I had dodged a bullet.

One of the first things which should have been a red flag was the need to pay the ESLinsider course fee via Western Union. Ian Leahy convinced me that this was how all TEFL schools arrange their course payments. He was very convincing, so I paid and waited, and waited, and waited. After a week of waiting, I got a reply to confirm that the payment went through. All I now had to do was create an account on his school website (https://www.course.eslinsider.com/) and I was good to go.

I followed the instructions and created an account. I was pretty excited by this point to start the course that Ian Leahy had claimed was the “creme de la creme of Online TEFL courses” (his own words, not mine.)

It was then that I realized the huge goof I had made.

The course didn’t have any structure to it. It consisted mainly of random pages of video tutorials, with Ian Leahy taking center stage. The course contains very poor video quality. Two of the videos were actually inaudible, due to the sounds of the children shouting and screaming at the top of their lungs.

No grammar was explained. Nothing like that. It was just a mashed-up series of videos in which Ian Leahy is teaching lessons to children. Below each video, there is a list of questions that you need to answer before you can gain access to the next low-quality TEFL video.

When I wrote to ESLinsider to complain (I was polite about it) they replied that a refund “isn’t applicable” because I started the course. Had I paid via credit card, I would have been able to contact my bank for a chargeback claim.

I decided that it wasn’t worth my while pursuing it anymore after I had complained on Quora and when Ian Leahy incredulously replied to my post that I had never taken his course and that I was an angry competitor. I have spent time reading his school blog and can see why competitors would be angry with him. His school blog is full of attacks on his competition. I can now see that this is probably ESLinsider’s way of winning new business.

Oh, and btw, I did check to see whether ITTT TEFL run xxxxxxxxxx.xxx and I never did find any truth to that accusation.

ESLinsider is probably best avoided. I’m awarding it 2 stars because I did learn something. It just didn’t cut it for me though and I lost a few hundred bucks in the process. The whole experience was just bizarre.

Essential Tip!

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