If you’re looking for a good California driver’s ed course online, then you’re in luck: your list of qualified courses is second to none. This means you or your child has plenty of alternatives to a dull classroom setting, and although driver’s education is never going to be fascinating, it doesn’t have to be nearly as tedious as it was 20 or even just 10 years ago.
On the other hand, the downside to this quantity of California driver’s ed courses is the fact that not all of them are up to the same standard of quality. The growing number of poor-quality courses out there is a problem that the California DMV is only starting to address directly, but fortunately, you don’t need to wait for the government to figure out which online offerings are good or bad.
California Driver’s Ed Requirements
All California teens under 18 years old who want to get behind the wheel are required to take driver’s education programs. While you think it might be a waste of time and money, it’s a necessary step that will teach teens all about road safety, responsible driving, California traffic laws, and most of all, avoiding accidents.
There’s no denying that driver’s ed takes long and it doesn’t come at a cheap price either. Taking a California DMV-approved online course is one of the fastest and most convenient ways to complete state requirements.
How so?
Taking classroom California driver’s ed means that you have to spend at least 30 hours in a classroom. That doesn’t include the time you spend at home reviewing your course textbook.
By enrolling in an online driving school, you can learn at your own pace from the comfort of your home. Most online driver’s ed will allow students to log on and off as they please because resources are 100% online and available 24/7.
*Note: Make sure to enroll in a California DMV-approved online driver’s ed that does not use a course timer.
Know What To Check For
There are actually a few easy signs that a California driver’s ed course is going to waste your money, and they’re easy enough to find on your own. In the first place, what sort of social media presence does the site have? Is it on Facebook and Twitter? For obvious reasons, scams and waste-of-space sites usually avoid places where they can receive customer feedback. While you’re at it, you should check Yelp and Google to see what people are saying about the course. If it’s bad or if no one’s saying anything, it won’t be worth your time, either.
Other things to watch for are customer-friendly measures like free samples, a money-back guarantee, and 24/7/365 customer service. Even a good driver’s ed course won’t necessarily come with all these features, but a bad course will more likely have none at all. Another good feature which a lot of California driver’s ed courses lack is parent resources. Nine times out of ten (or even more often than that), parents are going to be involved in their child’s driving education, and a good online course will help them involve themselves in the coursework and prepare them for the practical training.
Another important factor to consider is the learning tools available. Are the resources mobile-friendly and engaging? Is it in text format, or do they offer more interactive alternatives like an audio read-along feature, videos, and driver’s ed games? These are some questions you need to ask, especially if you have a hard time with text-based courses only.
Ask The Experts
If you’d rather avoid researching which online driver’s education courses are worth your time and which ones aren’t, then you’ve come to the right online resource. At Traffic School Critics, we investigate both online traffic schools and drivers education programs on all the points we’ve mentioned above and more.
A site needs to fulfill some strict criteria to get a TSC certification, including five years in operation and at least 500,000 satisfied customers. And as uninteresting as the course material is, we go through the full lesson plan personally every year to check for up-to-date multimedia offerings like animations and video, plus we’ll check whether the site is compatible with smartphones or tablets. If a course doesn’t get our seal of approval, it probably isn’t worth your time.
Explore Our Site For Further Reading
There’s a lot more to driving than what you learn in a government-mandated California driver’s ed course. At Traffic School Critics, we have a passion for driving that borders on an obsession, and after years spent driving both large and small vehicles, we’ve picked up a lot of techniques and tricks you can only get after a lifetime of practical experience. That’s why our site also has an extensive blog where we share some of the skills we’ve learned and taught to others when we were driving instructors ourselves.
As you might guess from our name, we also review and rate traffic schools, the mandatory courses which current drivers sometimes have to take if they get one too many traffic violations. It’s not a service that anyone really hopes to use one day, but here’s how we see it: if you have to go to traffic school, you might as well get the best bang for your buck.
So whether you’re a teen looking around for an alternative to the California drivers ed lessons held at your local high school or whether you’re an adult hunting around for a better bargain, we hope you’ll find our site to be a resource worth the time you take to check it out. We aren’t here to shill for one company or another, we want new drivers to have the best experience possible, which is why we leave the final choice of school up to you. Driver’s education will never be fun, but at least it should be interesting.