To help you prepare for your AINS® and CPCU® exams, The Institutes offers online courses that come with a variety of study tools. However, their courses are almost three times as expensive as our online courses. To help you decide if The Institutes’ courses are still right for you, we’ll explain all of The Institutes’ online course features and give you our take on how helpful those features really are.

The Institutes’ courses are not the only option – we offer online courses as well!

Ace your AINS® & CPCU® exams with the help of our study materials!

What study materials does The Institutes offer?

Most of The Institutes’ courses are online-only. For the CPCU designation, students can also purchase a printed textbook for an additional fee, but you must purchase it along with the online course and cannot just get the textbook as a standalone product.

Here is what you get with The Institutes’ online courses:

Online Course Assignments (i.e., text & video lessons)

For the CPCU designation, the online course is basically the text from the textbook, but broken up over several modules. Each chapter consists of about 3-7 modules, and most of modules are text-based, meaning you will be reading most of the content, but with an occassional video or two mixed in. Unfortunately, you can’t see the list of modules in a chapter until you actually click on the chapter title, so it can be a little tedious to find the module you were looking for if you can’t remember which chapter it was in.

Because these courses are primarily text-based, there is a ton of reading to do because only about 5% of the content is in video form. Compared to the textbook, we do think that the online modules are easier to read because:

1. The chapters are broken up into smaller, more digestible chunks.
2. The use of different colored text and expanding textboxes does break up the monotony of the text.

The course utilitizes three types of expanding textboxes:

1. What do you know?
2. Need more information?
3. Check your understanding

The first two will provide more information about a topic, whereas the last one provides a word problem for you to test your understanding. The textbook also has this content, and we do think they are helpful for solidifying your understanding.

Make sure that you do not skip the “What do you know?” and “Need more information?” boxes, because they often provide additional content or vocabulary terms that may come up on the exam.

In addition to the text content, there are also videos scattered throughout the modules. They are usually one of three types:

1. Animated cartoons
2. Doodle videos (whiteboard explanations)
3. Lecture style (person talking)

The animated cartoons are a nice way to get a visual representation of a concept in action, but the doodle videos are a bit frustrating. In the doodle videos, you are shown a hand writing out text or drawing out a picture in fast-forward speed. It takes the hand way too long to get through their doodles, which often add no value at all, but you feel like you don’t want to skip them because the text is sometimes useful. We believe that this is the video type The Institutes is referring to when they say “whiteboard explanations” in their promotional materials.

As for the lecture style videos, occassionally the speaker is going over terms or concepts that appear on the practice tests, but most of the time, the speaker is simply discussing a topic that is not going to be tested on the exam but is just there for your personal know-how.

Our overall opnion is that we like the video as a learning option, as it does help add some variety to your learning, but there should have been more video content so that you aren’t just reading walls of text. Also, we are not a fan of the doodle-style videos and it would have been helpful if they would distinguish which lecture-style videos you need to watch because you might actually be tested on their content.

How long to I have access to the course?

The biggest downside to The Institutes’ online courses is that students only have access for one year. That means you can’t save the materials for reference, and you can’t take a break from pursuing your designation if things come up in life. We have heard that some students were able to contact The Institutes to request an extension (for a fee of course), but we have never tried doing that ourselves.

Does the course work well on mobile devices?

You can access your online class via a mobile device, but there are a few things that could have been improved.

First off, just finding your newly-purchased course was a little bit cumbersome given The Institutes’ newly redesigned website. After logging in from The Institutes’ homepage, you have to click on the menu again a few times before you see the choice at the bottom that says “Hi [your name], under which you can find “My Courses” (this option did not appear the first few times we accessed the menu).

Also, we were not able to turn on the closed captioning option for the videos on a mobile device (we were using Chrome on an Android device).

Is it worth getting the optional textbook for an additional charge?

The textbook is literally the exact same content as the online course, word for word. In the places where the online course has a video for you to watch, the textbook will have a box telling you to watch the video rather than having the content typed out in the textbook. Because very few of the videos contain content that gets tested on, there are students that feel comfortable skipping the videos altogether. If you have to (or want to) choose between using only the online course or only the textbook, the decision should boil down to whether you prefer to read a physical book versus a online webpages.

Ace your AINS® & CPCU® exams with the help of our study materials!

Practice Exams

We have always felt that the practice questions offered by The Institutes is one of the most important study aids, so we are happy to see that they are included in the Online-Only Package. These are the same quizzes that students could previously access by entering the code printed in the back of their printed coursebook, and they are very similar to the questions you’d find on the SMART QuizMe app.

• You can take the practice quizzes as many times as you’d like.
• Each time you take the quiz, you may draw different questions as they draw from a bank of questions.
• You can choose to quiz on only a specific chapter, or you can do a “full practice exam” that draws questions from all chapters.
• When you review the answers, an explanation is provided for why the answer is wrong or correct.

Flashcards

The Online-Only Package also comes with a PDF file containing printable flash cards for the vocabulary terms that come up in this course. Each card does indicate what module it came from, so you know where to refer back to if you want to brush on that term.

The file is set to be one side of one card per page, so remember to change your print settings to multiple cards per page if you don’t want giant letter-size flashcards.

Optional Resources

There is also a section labeled “Optional Resources” that appears to include more articles related to your course topics. The CPCU 530 course we purchased only had printable articles, but it might be possible that other courses have both print articles as well as video content.

Simulated Exam

This is an interesting new feature, and it looks like it was designed to mimic the psychological feel of the real exam. You can only take the simulated exam once and it is timed, which more closely mimics the real test. However, it still differs from the traditional Prometric exam in that you can’t strike out answer choices you want to rule out; it only lets you flag questions to revisit later.

Glossary

A digital master glossary is also available in the online course, but it appears to have all the vocabulary terms from all the courses lumped together in one interface, without any way to sort out only the terms that pertain to this particular course.

Conclusion

The online-only course exceeded our expectations in that it did make it easier to read through the material, in our opinion, and it is admittedly convenient to have it the course in a portable format. However, we do think the “new” features are a little bit over-hyped, and some may find it a real disservice to not have a way to highlight, take notes in the margins, and to not have a course workbook to go through to solidify their understanding. Also, the fact that you only get access to the course for one year is a major con.

Ace your AINS® & CPCU® exams with the help of our study materials!