During the COVID-19 outbreak, I was relegated to working from home. I needed something to keep me occupied during my downtime. I chose the 180 hour level 5 course because I got a significant discount through my employer. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics, and I’ve been teaching English as a new language for over five years. The course is the real deal, at least in the sense that the theories it covers are exactly the same as what you’d find in any introductory college course. Some big names like Stephen D. Krashen appear. However, an online course can really only cover these theories in a very cursory fashion. It’s up to you to dig a bit more subcutaneously to get the most out of the course. A lot of the information you find throughout the course is available on the internet for free. For example, almost all of Krashen’s work can be downloaded for free from his personal website. The course also references a lot of YouTube videos which I thought was rather unprofessional. With that being said, I did actually learn a few things. I’m bilingual, so I often explain grammatical concepts to my students in their native language. However, it’s always good to explore how to teach without this luxury. I learned a lot about concept checking questions, and the PPP structure. I felt that the summative assessments were more tedious than they needed to be. Most teachers I know would never fill out a lesson plan to that level of detail. I’d also really like to see customizable modules in the future. I don’t teach kids very often, so it would’ve been more beneficial for me to have read a chapter about business English instead. Arguments can be made either way as to which is more of prominent in the industry. I’d also like to see the integration of some video lessons to break up the tedium of reading. I didn’t feel that the feedback I received from my assessments was very insightful either. I like to be really thorough. It took me about forty hours to complete the course. Ten hours per assignment, which there were three in total, and about ten hours of reading. If you have never taught before, if your degree is completely unrelated to education, and if the job you are applying for says that you absolutely need a nondescript TEFL certificate, then I would recommend the course if it’s been heavily discounted. The certificate won’t satisfy the requirements for certain entities that require an observation component (public schools in Korea and some first tier cities in China), but it’s more than enough for any entry-level position anywhere else. I highly recommend obtaining a TEFL certificate with an observation component while still residing in your home country if you want to make this a career with no barriers to entry.