Complicated, over-assessed, stressful.
Overview: Incredibly stressful experience. I only have two positives: the online learning means you can complete work in your own time, and the staff are friendly (when they can be reached). For context, I was looking for a career change, so I enrolled in the Cert II in Animal Care through OC. I work full-time as a high school science teacher, and already have a Bachelors Degree in Zoology and a Graduate Diploma in Education. I have been working through this Cert II in Animal Care for a little over 6 months and am finishing the first work placement component. It has genuinely been the worst educational experience I have ever had. The documentation associated with the work placement is convoluted, exhausting, and over-assessed. The expectations and criteria for each task are over-explained and making sense of everything takes up more time than doing the tasks to begin with. There were 20 pages of report comments that my supervisor had to complete, on top of documentation requiring my supervisor to sign off on every single action I completed. Once I got to submitting the evidence for my work placement, I was met with 19 online pages of questioning. Most of which had already been assessed in previous modules, as well as evidenced in the supervisor documentation, and several video recording submissions. It is over-assessed, complicated, and incredibly difficult to navigate. So much so, that when I spoke to a staff member on the phone for clarification, they admitted to (without prompting) feeling overwhelmed with the sheer volume of assessing they had to get through. In addition to this, the online platform is rife with errors and is not user friendly. Communicating with staff is a struggle, and it can take several days to get in touch with someone for support. I am uncertain whether I even want to finish my certificate through OC, and am contacting other institutes to compare their assessment styles. It feels like I have wasted 6 months and $4000.