Are ITTT and MyTEFL legit? Well, it depends what you mean by legit, but I am going to share my observations and insights which might help. I haven't actually taken a course with either one, so you can take this with a grain of salt.
ITTT and MyTEFL's accreditation
First I'll start with the "accreditation".
Sometimes I consider getting ESLinsider's courses accredited. Yet you should know that TEFL accreditation isn't actually a requirement for TEFL courses. There is also no one accrediting body for this.
Despite the fact that it isn't required it is apparently a form of social proof and trust for some people as many are searching Google for "accredited TEFL courses". So over the last month or so I have emailed a few different accreditors in TEFL which included OTTSA (who "accredits" ITTT & MyTEFL) and Accreditat.
The guy from Accreditat responded pretty quickly. However, OTTSA never responded and I actually have sent them 2 different emails inquiring about getting accreditation. And since they haven't responded I am questioning the validity of it and the courses that it accredits.
Is their accreditation an inside job?
OTTSA claims to accredit some courses by MyTEFL and ITTT. My doubts are that it may have an affiliation with one of these companies. It is said that this happens often with TEFL courses. That's when the course provider and the "accreditor" are actually the same person(s) with the accreditor using a different name.
OTTSA only claims to accredit these companies as well as another non-TEFL company. The other doubts I had may have been from an article about MyTEFL that I read by Alex Case.
If you are really an accrediting agency wouldn't you want to make more money by accrediting other courses? Why wouldn't you want to do that?
They have prices set on their site that ask for 180 pounds per 75-150 hour course. Yet in terms of online courses, TEFL hours are not accurate in any way. Some people complete 120-150 hour online courses in as little as 10 hours or so.
It's going to depend on the course and the person, but I completed one of those Groupon TEFL courses in around 8 hours. I am not trying to make anyone look bad, I am just telling it like it is. This is my experience.
I mean if you really want to do business and make money then why wouldn't you respond to inquires from a potential client?
Again I sent 2 emails. The first I sent directly on 8/8/2017 from my hotmail account. And the second email I sent using the form on their website on 9/15/2017. If they actually reply then I'll update this article, yet it doesn't change the fact that they didn't reply to my previous emails.
iTTT looks kinda spammy
I don't know much about their courses, but there is one thing I noticed...
Over the years I noticed that iTTT's site showed up in the search results and sometimes it was the same page with a different url. I did a little research with an online tool and found 9 different url's for their home page. See for yourself:
- teflcorp.com
- tefl-certificate.net
- tefl-tesol.net
- tefl-course.com
- teflcourse.net
- tesolcourse.com
- tefllife.com
- teflinternational.com
- teflcourse.net
If you go to any of those above pages you will find a page that looks the same. I think this might be pre-2010 SEO because it's really spammy.
MyTEFL
A few things that I noticed about MyTEFL.
- Claims to donate some of the money it earns to a charity.
- Like i-to-i they do a lot of affiliate marketing
I always see bloggers recommending MyTEFL. But if you look closely you will see that there is a reason why. That reason is because they are making money off of you when you buy a course after clicking on the link on their website.
