“SCAM and SPAM
That is how I describe them in a single phrase! Saw an advertisement for some 4 week trial photography course and wanted to see how they are with a trial course. After registration, I saw the course details and it appears that the course itself is not free for trial, but it is only part of the course. Fair enough - a trial is for us to know how it is rather than to get everything for free, although I was misled to believe entire course is for trial in the advert.
Now when I looked at further steps to be done before the first class, it had things like download toolkit which is required for the class (apart from certificate etc. for later stages) and each of them had a price next to it. So the toolkit for the class seemed to be a prerequisite and wanted to see what it is and clicked on it. BOOM I was charged £39.99 and said congratulations you bought it. I never clicked on anything to say I wanted to buy!! That was so SCARY that I stopped using the site and emailed them for a refund and asked them to close my account and all trials as I did not even want to try! The reason being they seem to make you spend even in your so called trial!
I get no response and I did not get any contact details to call on the website. Meanwhile I kept receiving at least 10 emails and 3-4 text messages and 2 WhatsApp messages to congratulate me for joining, buying something which I did not want to buy and multiple reminders for the course within 24 hours! But no response to my email to support. After a day and a half, I asked for an update. They I get some reference number and automated email saying this will be looked in 48 hours. After a while (good thing is it is not 48 hours as they said), I get a response saying they can not refund anything because it was bought by me (!?!?) but have credited some extra money to my shawacademy account (not a card refund) for me to be able to buy more stuff which I probably will not want to on their website! This seemed like a trap to make me spend more! And nothing related to my request to close my account and stop my trial.
Finally I looked at various menus in my account to see some button to cancel trial. After numerous number of clicks of confirmation that I want to cancel, finally it says call a number!! I called and luckily the lady on the phone was very good and canceled my trial. But she couldn't do anything with the £39.99 that I was charged!!
It is shambles!!”
“They are interactive with speech and slides for those attending the lessons via audio only. The teachers seem to have a vast knowledge of the topics they teach and come across as very energetic to keep you interested. You can go to the dashboard and recover any missed lessons as often as you need to. Quite hard-going sometimes in isolation, as can be expected when learning on-line, so discipline to learn is key. Quite of bit of pressure to pass 5 modules to get the certificate at the end as it costs a bit more than other learning sites.”
“They always have offers so that they entice students to learn. Their courses and assignments are very detailed and I gained a lot of knowledge from them to put into place in my work. Thank you!”
