ICAL was one of the very first schools offering online teacher training way back in 1998. Making use of powerful new internet technologies and employing only the best to both create and tutor our courses, we soon became the largest online provider with our courses being taken right across the world.

Since then ICAL has become firmly established as a leader in the field, often copied but always one step ahead!

With a new, innovative way of teaching, it soon became clear that the internet as a teaching medium is the way forward and now, with more tutors than any other online provider, thousands of graduates and many thousands more current students, you can be certain that when you join ICAL you are joining one of the largest and best online teacher training providers around today.

Our students come from all over the world and often come to us through word of mouth referrals. The reputation we have is second to none and the security of training with a well established school like ours is always worth while.

ICAL was formed in 1998 by a group of teacher trainers who were both disappointed with the quality of new teachers they had met but were also enthusiastic about the idea of utilizing modern technology to deliver quality training.

The original founders were teacher trainers based in Australia, the UK and the USA and had met both socially and professionally in the years before.

The original organisation was called The International College of Applied Linguistics and the first course was written as a collaborative effort by the founders.

At that time "ICAL" was used as a shorthand acronym for the full name. However in 2000 "ICAL" merged with another group of online teacher trainers who were disappointed with and disaffected from the company they were working for at the time.

The courses were entirely re-written and new administrative software was purpose built to handle the ever growing number of students taking the course. At that time we began to develop The ICAL Student Center as well.

The resultant collaboration was called ICAL - no longer an acronym, with the old name being dropped entirely.

ICAL was one of the very first online teacher training organisations. With a reliance on quality and a sincere belief in what we are doing, we soon emerged as one of the largest online providers on the Net.

In 2004 we began by completely re-programming The ICAL Student Center. We acquired a dedicated server to make it run faster and more securely than ever before and upgraded the backend database system we use. This took several months to complete but the result is impressive and has given our students far more security and ease of use than ever before.

In 2008 as we celebrate our 10th anniversary, we instituted the ICALwiki - a major resource for both ICAL Students as well as other teachers in need of well written and useful resources. The wiki is still a work in progress and is expanding rapidly.

There are plans afoot. We have several new courses in the pipeline and are actively recruiting new tutors for these - and our current - courses. We are also developing new ideas to give our students more control over the way they take the course in terms of technology and access.

In short, we intend to remain as the web's biggest and best provider of online TESL training. It's as simple as that!