Well, fuck me. I think this will be the most costly review I have ever written and one I decided to do as I kept seeing the advert for it and I wondered just how legal it was much like the Scottish Titles scam that was going around. With not much information from what I would call a trusted source, I figured I might as well try out and see just how legit providers like this are.
For this review I have two conditions and should one of them be hit I will consider the provider as legit:
- The qualification appears on my personal learner record.
- The qualification comes from an awarding body that Ofqual regulates.
- I will gain level 4 and 5 qualifications and a level 6 by the end of the course date (the review will be published once I get to level 5 and updated when I get to level 6).
Disclaimer: It should be worth saying that I have not been paid to do this review nor is the London School of International Business aware I am doing this review. You can find other reviews online by searching LSIB UK or other terms. For disclaimer purposes, I am a lecturer who teaches the Diploma of Higher Education in Information Technologies and I will not be relying on their teaching materials but I will review the resources they provide. This also means I am well aware of the command verbs and how they should be answered. Should the London School of International Business update me with any information related to this review I will update it such as if they comment on how to get the teaching resources etc.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Learning Provider
- Cost
- Enrollment
- Teaching Standards / Learner Management System
- Assignments
- Outcome
- Conclusion
- References
Introduction
Before I continue with the review I will put a few bits of information down on what you can expect from these providers.
- You won’t get much in the way of teaching.
- These ain’t the most respected of places compared to a university.
The first point is something I think most people who plan to do this course will expect you are mostly just given the assignments, a few recorded lessons and some textbooks and told to get on with it and maybe you can speak to a lecturer at times. Honestly, it isn’t that much different to The Open University if this is the case but I am going into this expecting there will be no teaching at all and I will need to self-study. I will define this provider as a success should I get a legal qualification at the end of it and I went with the provider known as London School of International Business. I decided to go with “L4L5L6DIT-OT” which is three qualifications worth 360 credits equal to a degree with honours. Originally I was going to just pick a level 6 diploma but thought that people who are doing this provider would likely be completed without having the experience to do a level 6 outright. The courses that are covered are listed below.
- OTHM Level 4 Diploma in Information Technology – Specification – Ofqual
- OTHM Level 5 Diploma in Information Technology – Specification – Ofqual
- OTHM Level 6 Diploma in Information Technology – Specification – Ofqual
The link to the course itself can be found here: Level 4-6 in IT Diplomas and the units are as follows.
| Level 4 Diploma | Level 5 Diploma | Level 6 Diploma |
|---|---|---|
| Computer and Network Technology | Software Engineering | Advanced Computer Networks |
| Cyber Security | Database Systems | Advanced Data Analytics |
| Managing Digital Information | Advanced Systems Analysis and Design | Advanced Database Management Systems |
| Principles of Computer Programming | Management Information Systems | Management Information Systems |
| Systems Analysis and Design | Network Information Systems | Computers, Society and Law |
| Web and Mobile Applications | IT Project Management | Computing Projects |
The Learning Provider
Looking at the website you would like to jump right to it not being legit and honestly I agree but if you dig into it deeper you can find further information which suggests otherwise. The first thing is although they do offer degree courses they do outright say they are not the ones to provide the degree itself which is correct and they partner up with an unknown university to provide these degrees. It might be worth pointing out that these universities might not be unknown and that they are likely the ones that OTHM has partnerships with OTHM’s University Progression. Not all courses use OTHM but I am assuming the logic might be the same.
The course I am doing is accredited and provided by OTHM Qualifications and OTHM is a legit valid provider when you check it with OfQuals.
It is worth pointing out quickly that although Ofqual recognises them and has been for 13 years, they surrendered their recognition from the CCEA which is for Northern Ireland. With OTHM being legit and able to legally provide an RQF qualification, the OTHM website says that the London School of International Business is an approved course provider.
The business itself is registered on the company’s house and when you look at the reviews for the place it does seem it is just one person who runs everything. There is a very strong possible chance that all of the London School names are the same company just with a different name. It is worth saying it is registered with the UK Register of Learning Providers which you can find using this ID: 10062390.
So far everything looks legit enough that it is legal and I have noticed after starting this that other providers such as Learn Direct are now offering the same type of course but not the level 6 Diploma part of it but rather just Level 4 and 5 Diploma and a top up to a university – something that this provider does as well. I will assume it is just a case of an Indian firm finding an opening in the market and now British companies are joining in or if the London School of International Business just had better marketing. It is worth saying that the London School of International Business does provide a refund if you contact them within a certain amount of days and while I haven’t done this there are people on Trust Pilot who have said they got a refund but naturally with Trust Pilot you have to judge yourself if you trust that but based on my experience nothing suggest this isn’t the case.
Cost
As of July 2023, the course cost me £2,850 (£1,995 with discount) to do the fast track but it doesn’t seem it matters as I was emailed I had to finish by the date agreed. It could be a case where you can pay for the longer one and rush it but I can confirm which one you signed up for and decide when you get the final qualification. When I emailed them regarding finishing level 6 I was told it would be sent out at the end of the course timing so if you go for the nine-month one they will send it at the end and if you do the twelve-month one they will do it then. Doesn’t matter much unless you are in a hurry for it.
As I paid the whole thing in one go they do provide a discount and surprisingly all of this will cost me less than two grand. If at the end of this, I get three qualifications at levels 4-6 this is an amazing steal (but more on why this might not be the case for you later).
Enrollment
Originally I was planning to do this review in 2022 but I decided to push it off to the year afterwards due to some personal things that were happening and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to complete the required work (if any) before the deadline. Before I signed up I went back and forth with them about some concerns I had and while they didn’t answer the questions I found my answers with the research I provided above. I signed up on the 10th of July and I then dropped £1995 in one payment as I didn’t want to deal with installment payments but it was an option.
When I looked into the London School of International Business one of the many things I read was that many cannot access their course and I was surprised to get the email with my login details the next day.
Teaching Standards / Learner Management System
Once you have paid for it you have access to the learning area where, as expected, it just gives you a bunch of assignments and the learning outcomes. You will find on the website it will ask you to upload your details such as ID, proof of address and qualifications and this is something all learning providers will have to do but you will find they will also ask for a “Personal Statement” where they ask you to record yourself for a couple of minutes about why you did the course and judging by this they are published on their review page. Nothing suggests on this page that they are not legit but I did not do this nor was I forced to do so at any point.
You do have access to a website that provides you with learning materials, but I would recommend you either be using YouTube or you already know it and won’t need to rely on any materials. I have found places online where it the says London School of International Business provides textbooks but I am unable to find anywhere on the learning management system where you can access it so you may need to email their administration team to get them emailed to you but this is something I did not try. I have found online that you can “Request you to please email admin regarding the textbooks.”1 this is something you might want to get in touch with first if you are going to rely on these but you can always visit a local library and borrow books.
On their website, they do say “[a]ll programmes come with direct [faculty/lecturer] support using discussion forum and dedicated chat support.”2. This part may be a lie. I can not find a single area on the website where there is a community forum but there is an online helpdesk that appears when you log in I am not aware if this is a live chat with the lecturer or a general administrative staff. You can also contact the administrative team via email and when I emailed once they did get back to me about the assignment and how to do it but beyond that I never contacted them for any other issues.
The student area references using the messaging centre to get in touch with the tutors but I am unable to see anything that hints towards being a message centre. For the problems I have had, I have been able to get them answered via email but other users such as Hannah3 have posted their reviews saying it is nearly impossible to contact the lecturer as they are “always busy” or have some other technical issues. As much as I tried to reach out to Hannah, I could not find her contact details to find out how she could contact the lecturer, but I will stress this is a valid point. If you are doing this course you should expect to do this solo with no internal help from them. It is worth commenting that near the end of this review (as in when I nearly finished the course) I found that the Brave Browser blocked the chat feature when logged in on the learning management system but I didn’t get a chance to give it a try to see if they will help with the subject matter but I did contact them regarding a problem with an assignment that I will comment on later.
You may find there is a version of their website that offers webcam support. Still, again I find no evidence of this on their website when you log into the learning management system (Edit: It came to my attention that if you access courses.lsib.co.uk you find the same courses but you can pay extra for webcam lessons). If you require actual teaching you might find the London School of International Business isn’t for you but you will find YouTube tends to be a good enough resource nowadays and will cover most topics and if you search “OTHM” + “Unit Title” you might find some. Overall if you are signing up to be taught I wouldn’t recommend it based on what I have experienced and what you are paying for is the diploma itself which is quite common with a lot of universities and just tells you to carry out research much like I had with NTU.
The assignments themselves take about a week to be marked and you get feedback. You get feedback on what you did to hit the learning outcome. If you fail an assignment you get it back with clear what you need to do to complete the learning outcome. However, this only happened when they mixed up the management information systems (more on that later) or sent it back due to their plagiarism detector often picking up things such as table of contents and references and this happened quite a bit for me.
For those interested, this is what the page looks like once you are given access. You can click on “Unit details” to go to a page where you can find the learning outcomes, indicative content and study materials. The study materials are a bunch of links to different websites and some did not work but I have found over the course they do update it by emailing them regarding broken links they do fix them. You can click download assignment to find the assignments and once an assignment has been marked you can download faculty feedback.
It is worth saying before we move on to the assignments according to OTHM this course is meant to be 480 guided learning hours for just level 6 and as far as I see there is no teaching. If anyone reading this had teaching such as speaking with a lecturer etc please do let me know and I will pin your comment but as far as I see and I will stress this again – you will be on your own with the limited resources they provide.
Post Course Update: It is worth saying that it seems the London School of International Business has changed some things. I have noticed that it is now saying “Version 2” of the course and within unit details I see there are now some resources. Having a quick look at them they are not great but they will help to complete your assignments and the further reading they recommend ain’t half bad. This review carries on without this in mind but it is just worth saying they seem to now exist.
Assignments
I was originally planning to share some of the assignments but I decided against it as I have noticed some assignments have changed and it is likely to change again soon. While it does seem these are sample assignments from OTHM they generally follow the BTEC style where the first assignment is theory work, the second is making something and then you are presenting what you have created. I am not going to comment on if the assignments are hard but I can say the assignments are very similar to the level I gave when I used to teach the Diploma of Higher Education (level 5) and the level 6 assignments are what I would expect from the level.
You are expected to use the command verbs correctly and you do need to reference your work and you must cite accordingly. I can confirm this as for one assignment I mistakenly mis-cited and it flagged up and the assignment will be returned to fix. Everything you submit are assignments and you do have to do some practical work. The practical work is up to you to document which could include pictures, video links or whatever you feel is best. There were three assignments per unit and I completed each assignment as one big document for each unit and submitted only one PDF per unit. I am not aware if you can upload more than one file but I am assuming not as it only shows one file per unit. Moreso it is worth commenting that in two assignments I didn’t follow the brief but completed everything in the learning outcomes and what was listed in the indicative content and it was accepted.
On their website, it says you are allowed to keep resubmitting the assignment and I felt this was quite questionable but surprisingly there are exam boards that do this. There is an exam board known as Gateway which the college I teach at has started to use and they allow students to submit their work as many times as they want. When I queried this with another lecturer he pointed out that this happens with pass/fail courses so it is quite likely this is what OTHM’s allows.
One thing worth commenting about that happened during the course was I handed in the Management Information System (L6) assignment and it was marked against the Management Information System (L5) assignment criteria. Online support quickly got it to be resubmitted which was remarked based on the correct criteria although I had to make some adjustments due to missing a criteria. Sadly once I handed it back in the same happened yet again and then happened for Management Information Systems (L5) and after speaking to live support I was told to include the title of the unit within the work or it would keep happening which I can understand.
It is worth pointing out that the assignments are very heavily plagiarism-checked and use Plagiarism Check to do so. This report naturally checks for plagiarism and AI content and something you will come to learn is a lot of work will pop up with AI-generated if you use tools such as Grammarly to check your work. They do want the plagiarism to be under 8% and I found at times my table of contents and references flagged up even when they were done in the referencing style they wanted. While it was annoying to resubmit some work it honestly isn’t a big deal it is something many providers are now facing and something when marking work I have to be mindful but I shouldn’t have to remove the table of contents, student ID numbers and page numbers and they should overlook that stuff without blindly following a percentage. I am assuming this percentage is the “sweet number” that the awarding body likes but it was annoying there was no comment sense applied with them ignoring the obvious original text and commonly used formatting it is because they seem to put everything into a text file to do so and it strips a lot of formatting.
This is something other people had problems with such as “N”4 who as of writing this review spent three weeks trying to get it fixed. While I am not sure how they are communicating with them I think something might have happened at the London School of International Business as my work wasn’t marked during that time but for anyone that might have a complaint you should contact admissions@lsib as that is their official complaint email address based on their terms and condition otherwise you should contact the awarding body that deals with that qualification which you can find under accreditation on the course page.
Outcome
Roughly in October 2023, I completed two different levels and this is where I was expecting it to be a scam. Still, I suddenly got an email from OTHM saying that I have now been registered with them for the OTHM Level 6 Diploma in Information Technology and the OTHM Level 4 Diploma in Information Technology although oddly not the OTHM Level 5 Diploma in Information Technology at the same time. At the end of the month, I got another email saying I had been registered for the OTHM Level 5 Diploma.
Having completed level 4 in September I was concerned that I hadn’t heard anything so I emailed them and they replied that they are currently in the middle of sending all documents to OTHM for validation and that it will be done by the end of the week and it will take two weeks for everything to be confirmed. Based on this I should have gotten an email from OTHM by the end of next month and while this never happened I got the following email on the 17th of January, 2024.
You do not get a physical certificate for free and you need to pay £55 for a physical copy (depending on where you live) and delivery but you do get a digital one included with the transcript. You can also validate it online and while I have shown the digital copy below I have blacked out personal information and that includes the QR code to certify it. It is worth saying I have ordered physical copies but as far as I am concerned they do give you the certificate and they are from OTHM. Judging by how long it took to get emails from OTHM it does seem the London School of International Business sends all the work to be externally verified every second month of the year (so February, April, June etc) so if you are someone wondering when they will get their certificate it might be worth waiting two months but it does seem they only send one level at a time. For those interested I got confirmation that the work for levels 5 and 6 the work was sent off to OTHM on the 21st of February and I got confirmation it passed on the 19th of March for level 5 and I need to wait until January 2025 for level 6 which I can confirm was awarded on the 12 of November 2024.
With the confirmation of the certificate in place (but not yet having the physical copy) I waited roughly two weeks and then requested a copy of my Personal Learning Record as not so surprisingly you can’t access your record online anymore using the National Careers Service. I figured it would take around a month to get my records which should be enough time for either OTHM or the London School of International Business to update the Government as I believe they have to do it within two weeks for non-A-Level or GCSEes although I might be wrong. For those wondering didn’t appear on my learning record when I requested it in February but it is worth commenting I had missing qualifications on there and I will request it again at the end of the year once I get the level 6.
Conclusion
Cost
Assuming all you are interested in is in a legal qualification you are unlikely to find much better for the price. As of 2023, you would be paying £9,250 a year for a degree. For around a third of that, you will get a level 4, 5 and 6 diploma. For those that are interested in just getting a qualification and won’t need any teaching, it might be worth considering such as if you are a working professional already. The cost for the London School of Business is around the same as it would at Learn Direct which I would have trusted without any issues. If all you are interested in is getting the qualifications and will need no support this is an amazing price. If you require teaching or expecting it this is not worth the price and you would be better off looking elsewhere. While I do believe the cost of university is very high and should be toned down one thing you will not get with the London School of International Business is support with employment or connections that you might get with a university although even that is quite limited nowadays.
Teaching Quality
While some people have posted online about speaking with lecturers I have no experience with this and am wondering if there is a paid package out there which provides teaching (Edit: You can find it if you order from this website courses.lsib.co.uk). In my experience, there was no teaching and the materials they provided were bad. They provided a bunch of links, some being to Wikipedia for each unit and access to Academia, which is useful if you know how to use it. They do provide feedback on what you miss out for their assignment but ultimately if you are doing this course you are doing it by yourself so expect no guidance with completing the work.
One thing I do believe the London School of International Business will benefit from is creating a forum much like the Open University does. If they had a forum where students could post questions and see answers from others with the lecturers getting involved it would have massively changed the experience for me. I did read online that the London School of International Business provides books but I was unable to find this this could be a case of having to email the administrative team based on information I found on Trust Pilot.
Legitimacy
The qualification is legal but the company still feels questionable. The fact it legally provides a qualification in the United Kingdom should be enough to trust it but there is something that still lingers in my mind. Ultimately the provider did what it said it would be and I would have no problems paying for another course (which is a shame they don’t do Jewish Studies).
Interestingly there are references to a company called “SAAC Labs” although I can not tell if they are a company that runs it or if it is a place that has provided resources during my research I found SAAC Labs is related to Tutor2book which seems to provide educational resources or private tutors. For privacy’s sake as this provider is legitimate in my eyes I do believe I know the names of the people who run the business itself and a little bit of digging seems to confirm I am right. I have saved the information in case in future something comes about with this provider but honestly, I feel you should not have a problem trusting them.
It is worth commenting that the London School of International Business doesn’t seem to register you with the awarding body and only registers you once you have completed the course so in my case it was done once I completed the level 4. While I imagine this might be against awarding bodies agreements as a learner it doesn’t affect you much. The only time I imagine it will matter is if you don’t have the requirements and the awarding body denies you registering for the course after you have completed the work.
| Cost | Teaching Quality | Legitimacy |
|---|---|---|
| ★★★☆☆ | ★☆☆☆☆ | ★★★★★ |
★★★☆☆
If you’ve had any experiences with the London School of International Business, whether it’s about signing up, navigating through the courses, or gaining qualifications, I’d love to hear from you! Your insights could be super helpful for others considering similar educational paths. Don’t hesitate to drop a comment and share your thoughts!
While my review is honest it is still just my opinion. I would recommend having a look at other people’s opinions as mine can simply be a one-off. I have included a few below.
References
- admin @ LSIB (2021). Vanessa – Reviews. [online] uk.trustpilot.com. Available at: https://uk.trustpilot.com/users/61655ba13a37bb00131fdde8 [Accessed 20 Jan. 2024]. ↩︎
- Business, D. and D. by L.S. of I. (2022b). London School of International Business. [online] www.lsib.co.uk. Available at: https://www.lsib.co.uk/2022/smart-learning.aspx [Accessed 14 Dec. 2023]. ↩︎
- Welstead, H. (2023). Hannah Welstead gave London School of International Business – LSIB, UK 1 star. Check out the full review… [online] Trustpilot. Available at: https://uk.trustpilot.com/reviews/657b5af9c5b86a10f164b5a3 [Accessed 16 Dec. 2023]. ↩︎
- N” (2024). N. gave Lsib 1 star. Check out the full review… [online] Trustpilot. Available at: https://uk.trustpilot.com/reviews/65ac07651a21df42a9fa5b96 [Accessed 23 Jan. 2024].
↩︎
Thanks for reading! You may be interested in this …
Hi Dear,
Thank you for elaborating detailed review of LSIB. I am in process of enrolling for a program and want to check whether this institute is legit or not. My purpose is to complete year masters degree which will include diploma 7 and top up program. Still not clear, whether i will continue or not?
From my experience you will get a qualification from the end of it. I have the qualifications from OTHM which is a Ofqual accepted qualification which I got from LSIB. Your experience on the actual quality may vary – I wouldn’t expect any teaching from it and I have heard from others that their plagiarism checker is very harsh but that isn’t something I noticed although it may be because I referenced and cited correctly from the get go.
If I had the option to do this or learndirect who should go for .. Do you have a review on learndirect?
I don’t have any experience with Learndirect but Learndirect as far as I know is a respected company that has been selling courses for years. If you want to learn something I would recommend looking at Learndirect. If you only care about a cheap qualification LSIB would be worth a look.