Ardent Academy crams too many children in each online class for only one teacher. The obvious result is that they cannot provide the attention and assistance that one think their child will get for the high price they pay. The office hours are just as farcical: one college student in a zoom meeting with 25+ children, answering questions one at a time while all others wait. In this environment there is no way to spend quality time figuring out where students are having issues and guiding them towards the answers. Instead, assistance is rushed and superficial. Ardent Academy is not the top establishment they are marketing themselves as. In addition, the staff is extremely rude and doesn't accept any kind of criticism.
AP
A P.
Underdelivers and act in bad faith
Dr. Li (teacher and owner of the business) performs his class using the Zoom Webminar platform. This means that students can never speak to nor interrupt the teacher. And the teacher cannot see student's webcams to catch visual signs of struggle. The only option is to type questions in the chatbox. (imagine asking a question with fractions and exponents in a basic text field!). Let alone do it quickly without missing what is said in the class since the teacher cannot be interrupted in this one-way setup.
Because of the high teacher/student ratio and the pace of the class, the teacher can only answer a small number of students' questions sent by keyboard chat. So it is left unanswered 90% of the time. And the teacher is not waiting at the end of the class to answer those. As soon as the last problem/answer is reached, he disconnects promptly, and no follow-up will be provided by e-mail or phone! The teacher cannot determine whether the student "guessed" the answer, nor if they arrived at the response by luck, accident or used an improper method because the software only checks if the answer is correct. Even regular school teachers ask their students to "show how they reached the solution" to ensure they used the proper method!
Outside of the webinar sessions, children have homework to do. The exercises are on the Ardent Academy online portal. The same principle applies: the platform will check the answer typed by the student and indicate whether it is correct or not. If they are correct, the students will never know if they used the proper method, and whether the exercise they solved in 20 minutes could have been solved in 5 minutes using a different approach, or if they accidentally found the correct answer.
There is a "Request Assistance" button on each exercise. When you click on it, it displays a message indicating that someone will get in touch within 24 hours. In several months, this never happened to us: no one e-mailed, no one called.
Ardent Academy offers 1h of "Office Hours" twice a week, where students can login to a zoom meeting, and ask questions. Students need to come ready with the question numbers they need assistance with. This time it is a meeting platform where everyone hears each other.
Out of 9 office hours sessions my son participated, 8 had only one teenager "teacher" for 20+ students waiting for their turn to ask a question. Because of the huge ratio teacher/students, children are lucky if they can ask 1 question, and they get the answer at lightspeed because all the others are waiting. Most of the time, the teacher provides the exercise's answer without a proper explanation on how to get there. So you basically get the same thing as buying a book of exercises with the answers.
I contacted the management to pull my son out and asked for a refund. A couple of representatives asked to explain my decision, and I detailed the above comments. The first person confirmed that Ardent Academy failed to deliver on their promises and apologized. I was pleased with this representative's ability to recognize the problem. However she said there she can't do anything about the pre-paid fee, and that would need to be escalated to a manager. The second person listened to my explanations and had a very different attitude. She tried to make me believe that this was the first time a person complained about the program, and she focused the rest of the call on the "no refund policy".
I was told that I would receive a response by e-mail. A couple of days later, I received an e-mail with 2 PDF attachments. It came from the person I last spoke on the phone, which is most likely a co-owner of the business. In the e-mail, she indicates that I would exceptionally get a 1/3rd refund, minus a $50 fee! To add insult to the injury, this small refund is conditioned to signing the attached non-disparaging agreement cleverly written to prevent me or anyone in my family from talking or writing anything negative about Ardent!
The first attachment is a report of exactly 20-pages with the list of classes in the program, the ones that my son connected to with time stamps. They added screenshots of the homework exercise screen and a red outline showing the "Request Help Button"; screenshots of the program indicating when a correct solution has been entered, a copy of their catalog, and a copy of their terms and conditions. NOTHING about the issues reported. The format is clearly for preparing a fee dispute attempting to represent that the service has been provided and consumed, disregarding any issue.
Instead of acting honorably and acknowledge the deficiencies in the service delivered, Ardent Academy's management resort to corrupt tactics of misrepresentation and muzzling agreements to keep our money and avoid negative feedback. What a shame!
