If you are at all like us here at English Central, you bristle at these young kids going to teach English overseas who don’t think they need any training because either they are native speakers or because they did an English major in college. Bless the occasional one who has enough respect for teaching that they decide to take a course…. but sadly, pity them because they usually do not do enough research into which programs are decent ones and just go with the cheap and quick weekend course that ends up being a waste of time (and that makes them think that there isn’t much to teaching after all).
Well, rejoice! Cambridge English has just released a free MOOC with Future Learn. The goal of this MOOC is to educate these kids (and others interested into getting into the ELT gig) on what good teaching is and how important it is to get appropriate training. We suspect it may be a soft sales approach to getting more people to take CELTA, but we would actually have to do the course to be sure and that’s not going to happen because we have books to sell. However, even if that is the case, we would’t object, because CELTA is as good as it gets when it comes to short teacher-training courses and if it stems the tide of people taking bogus weekend courses, the world of ELT and the respect for our profession will be all that much better off.
The remaining question is: how will the kids find out about it? We are not entirely sure, but we hope you will pass the word along to anyone who could benefit.