What is your favorite travel memory?
My favorite place in the whole world is Costa Rica. I went to visit friends in 2010, when the movie Avatar had just come out, and I remember walking through the jungle and thinking how everything was so surreal like in the movie.
Back then Costa Rica wasn’t as popular as it is today, so places like Rio Celeste and Santa Teresa were rogue and off the beaten path. Today there is a paved road to Rio Celeste with a waterfall that receives thousands of tourists to visit the National Park daily by bus. There is a big parking lot that includes facilities for tour guides, washrooms, and lunch to be purchased on-site. Today, when you get to the waterfall, you take a picture and keep trekking to the next site. Back then you arrived to a farm, trekked to the waterfall, and spent the afternoon swimming with your friends.
I also learned to surf in Costa Rica and it changed my life because I wasn’t following a healthy lifestyle at the time. Surfing connected me back to sports, myself, and to the great outdoors, so when I returned to Toronto I started mountain biking, kayaking, and skiing.
How have you changed/grown since working for your current company?
I started at OnTESOL as a Marketing Assistant in 2007, when I finished my business degree and the institute was barely a start-up, almost unable to keep the lights on, and only one out of five co-founders were putting in the work to keep it running. With a new partnership structure in 2010, I was promoted as General Manager to help OnTESOL through several scale-up stages over the years, including course development, accreditation, new services, and technology implementation. In 2023, I became the CEO.
I grew a lot over the years thanks to the freedom OnTESOL gave me to take new courses and pursue other career opportunities.
In 2007, I was just finishing my business degree and didn’t want to work for a big, harmful corporation. But I really didn’t know what else was out there at the time. OnTESOL was appealing because it gave me the freedom to travel, continue my education, and figure out what I wanted. I remember driving back from Rio Celeste in Costa Rica and thinking, what if, instead of accepting and normalizing all the poverty that exists on our gem of a planet, we lived in better harmony with nature. This led me to take on new studies and career opportunities, including:
-Masters degree in Economic Development and Innovation.
-Three years working for a Canadian federal government agency that gives loans to business scale-up projects in priority sectors such as High Tech, Clean Teach, Life Sciences, AI, IoT, and Advanced Manufacturing.
-Economic Development research projects related to priority sectors.
-Circular Economy research projects to understand why clean energy and recycling goals are promoting more environmental destruction and how government innovation agencies can support businesses to make products more durable and repairable to save the energy and materials that go into replacing broken or obsolete products with new ones.
During the 3 years I worked for the federal government, I stayed as a consultant for OnTESOL while I learned new skills and took new courses in financial and data analytics. I also learned from working on hundreds of business applications in various industries how to properly scale-up an organization.
This work experience taught me to implement a 5-year scale-up plan for OnTESOL, which concluded in 2023 and included new technology implementation, data analytics related to student progress, interactive features, a greater variety of pre-recorded videos, new practical live courses via Zoom and ACCET accreditation. The talent who joined us and the new processes we implemented significantly grew the capacity of OnTESOL to continue at the forefront of TEFL/TESOL innovation in the next 5 years.
What is the best story you've heard from a return student?
I believed that OnTESOL was for real and wanted to make a difference when students would come back thanking us for how the lesson planning skills helped them to get a great job or to open their own school. I noticed how many online providers were ill-preparing people to teach abroad with a quick TEFL course or charging hefty internship fees for a paid travel experience, all at the expense of people learning English. Sadly, this kind of experience has forced so many teachers to repeat their TESOL/TEFL course with us to get the training and accreditation they need to advance their career.
The mission at OnTESOL has always prioritized the delivery of quality teacher training courses backed by world-renowned accreditations. However, when I began at OnTESOL, I didn’t know what that really meant until I started the TESOL Expert program for our graduates to share their experiences.
I was really happy with the initial response from graduates, who shared how the teaching methods and lesson planning frameworks they learned with OnTESOL helped them to succeed. It wasn’t just the teachers earning a great salary in the UAE or Hong Kong who were benefiting from our TESOL/TEFL courses. OnTESOL graduates in rural and remote regions of the world, where schools didn’t have any ESL textbooks, were thriving using authentic materials and task-based lessons. Our graduates were actually making a real impact in the world with their original lessons. For example, one graduate in Papua New Guinea explained how teaching English abroad has to be specific to the needs of the student. She worked for a program that employed displaced farmers as scuba diving tour guides. Learning about traveling and cultural experiences in North America or the UK, as is the case with most ESL textbooks teaching beginner-intermediate ESL, was not of interest to her students, so she taught them grammar and vocabulary lessons related to directions and time in a way that was meaningful for their job as scuba diving tour guides.
If you could go on any program that your company offers, which one would you choose and why?
I would recommend the 168-hour Hybrid TEFL Certificate. This is a discounted course that combines the 120-hour Advanced TESOL Certificate course with the live 10-hour Lesson Planning Workshop and three of our most popular specialist courses. This online TEFL course is always at a 35% discount because it’s a bundle package to reduce the tuition fees of the additional live workshops and specialist modules.
The most important part of this course is the four live sessions related to the advanced lesson plan assignments in the course. For years, many people were asking us for a live experience to ask a tutor questions in a live format and participate in group activities in preparation for the lesson plan assignments.
During the initial application to ACCET accreditation, we were required to develop a synchronous live component. After 1 year of surveying students, we developed a live course with practical and interactive elements, resulting in trainees completing better assignments and finishing the online TESOL/TEFL courses faster.
What makes your company unique? When were you especially proud of your team?
OnTESOL is one of the few online TESOL/TEFL institutes capable of adapting an in-class course originally recognized by TESL Canada and Trinity CertTESOL into an academically equivalent online program. I’m especially proud of the team’s ability to continue to improve the online courses, stay updated with the latest technologies, and continue to strive for new accreditation by the leading Post-Secondary Education and TESOL/TEFL organizations from Canada and the USA.
But more importantly, none of this would have happened if the senior management team wasn’t able to become vulnerable to receive feedback from students who were struggling in the course and needed a more interactive experience.
In the beginning, offering the in-class experience in an online format wasn’t easy. The technology to offer synchronous training was either too expensive or inaccessible to students. To be honest, 20 years ago the online course consisted of a PDF textbook with links to PowerPoint video presentations and tutor support via e-mail. This wasn’t specific to OnTESOL. I remember taking a variety of online courses at different colleges and universities, and the general online learning experience was self-paced and asynchronous. Some online courses I took in university didn’t even offer tutor feedback or support, so they would grade my assignment without giving me any room to understand the improvements I need for real life situations.
When we implemented the new LMS platform in 2020, it gave us a greater ability to study the data of students struggling in the course, including surveying those students about their struggle and the features that would help them learn better. This resulted in a much larger library of pre-recorded videos, new interactive features, the new live 10-hour Lesson Planning Workshop, and ACCET accreditation.
Our innovation strategy did not culminate with ACCET accreditation. In fact, one of their accreditation requirements is to regularly perform surveys, data analytics, research projects, and educational reviews for ongoing updates and improvements.
After 20 years in the industry, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the ride. I’m particularly proud at how our team continues to be determined to lead the TESOL/TEFL industry with innovation and a mission to make online teacher training both more effective and more affordable than the in-class experience. Stay tuned for more updates in 2024!
What do you believe to be the biggest factor in being a successful company?
The biggest factor in our success is that we never stopped learning. We challenged ourselves to pursue certificates and degrees that complement the skills we need to grow OnTESOL. Even those highly intimidating courses, such as accounting and statistics, were crucial in building our capacity to finish challenging projects. The live workshops and ACCET accreditation would have never been concluded without the skills I learned in courses I didn’t want to study.
It’s funny how I always struggled with math-based courses in university until I started to work for OnTESOL and learned about the communicative methods. While taking my bachelor degree, I used to barely pass or I would even fail accounting and statistics. I figured my mind was blocked from learning. Yet, I think it was because I was given examples of businesses I would never want to work for. Working for OnTESOL opened the doors for a new way of learning about any subject, so it became easier to learn when I studied in the context of the career objectives I wanted to accomplish.
