From late November 2016 thru late March 2017 I was enrolled in APPA, an online course for placenta encapsulators. If you don’t want to read more, let me sum up my review by saying my experience was terrible from start to finish. I strongly do not recommend APPA. If you want the details, here are my full thoughts.
APPA WORK ETHIC
To understand some of the issues with APPA, a quick tutorial on how APPA works is needed. When a student enrolls they are assigned to a mentor. This mentor is the contact each APPA student has with the program. Students turn their work into their mentor, the mentor is the one who grades the work and the mentor is the one who sends out the next assignment. Assignments are given one at a time and students cannot access to future assignments without their mentor. Furthermore, students are prohibited from contacting their mentor or anyone from APPA outside the approved email address. APPA students may not connect via social media or via regular email. (Ironically, I discovered many months later that some of my emails were responded to via FB messager. They of course went to my other folders as students are told FB communication is prohibited.)
When I joined APPA during the Black Friday sale, my first issue was simply getting my first assignment. There was no delay in taking my money, but it was not until I reached out via their website that I got any information as to when I would get materials, or how. When I did reach out, I was told the APPA office would send them out in 5 business days. However the website said the APPA office was only open one day of the week. I was unsure if that meant five “APPA” days or five real business days.
After a bit of administrative back and forth, including a few links that didn’t work to the online classroom, I finally did get my first assignment. Things were going well, and I made it through a few assignments. Then a notice went out to all students that APPA was about to take a “hiatus” (their terminology) for the holiday. While I completely understand that the mentors do not want to work on Christmas, the hiatus was a month. I personally had been hoping to get through the material during the downtime I typically have around the holidays, but as assignments are parceled out one at a time and there is no way to get an assignment completed or moved to the next ones without a mentor that was not to be. APPA literally comes to a grinding half for a month during December and January. There were many frustrated students right along with me.
APPA Staff Turnover
After the long hiatus, I received a note saying my mentor was no longer with APPA and that I would be receiving a new one. At this point I am still waiting to turn in my assignments and receive new ones until I have the mentor. I waited for a while then emailed Jules, the owner of the company. I heard nothing back from her at all. A while later I am assigned a new mentor and I work through a few more assignments, completing most of the modules. Then I am told that my mentor has left APPA and that I will need to wait on reassignment. Once again I am a standstill. I have one module to go at this point and it is complete, I just need to have an email of a mentor to turn it in. This time I waited a MONTH with no contact. When I was finally contacted with an email I immediately turned in my final assignment. I never heard from that mentor at all other than I got auto generated note saying my work had been completed and that I would get a certificate in the mail sometime in the next 6 months.
I do not feel that what was provided was mentorship. I was provided no feedback on my assignments and for most of the time I was enrolled I did not have a mentor at all. The staff turned over constantly while I was enrolled, not just for me but all the students. Keep in mind, APPA has less than a hundred (I was number 71) certified members. In the few months I was involved with APPA the staff turned over three or four times excluding the owners. It was very difficult to keep up with who was who.
APPA Course Materials
I wish the news got better here, but unfortunately it does not. The first assignment included tests with wrong answers (this was corrected just before I left when many of us complained) and pictures of unsanitary practices. The students were often the ones pointing this out. Anytime it was mentioned one of the admins of the FB group would delete the post and often they simply kicked out the person who brought up the issue. Even when the materials were correct they were unprofessional. The photos are grainy and pixelated – clearly not taken with a good camera with good lighting. If you want to learn to identify calcification or infarcts these pictures are not going to be helpful.
APPA also was not on the same page with itself. In one incident that occurred while I was there they sold a pot to a member through their store to be used in traditional method processing. When she submitted her tradition prep protocol photos, her assingment was rejected because they said the pot she used was not acceptable. The student showed them the receipt for the pot that she bought from APPA and she was promptly kicked out of the APPA groups (with no recourse or money back).
In another incident. one mentor told a student that she could use digital forms for her client evaluations. These were turned in and accepted. Then another student tried to do this and was told it was not acceptable. When she brought it up on the FB group, both students involved were promptly removed from the APPA group (with no recourse of money back)
There was also a case of plagiarism while I was enrolled. The woman whose websites was copied by the other student brought it up in the student Facebook group. Basically she was told to get over it and no action was taken. So using the right (yet wrong) pot can get you kicked out of APPA but plagiarism is apparently fine. That leads us to the zero tolerance policy.
The ZERO Tolerance Policy
Jules, the owner states that she has a “zero tolerance policy” toward staying in APPA. She can kick anyone out at any time for any reason without telling them why or providing opportunity for conflict resolution, peer review or restoration. She does not even need to let you know what you have done at all. Removing someone is entirely at her discretion and she does not refund money. As in the example of the plagiarism, some things will not get your kicked out (blatant plagiarism of fellow students) but asking why the pot you bought from her is not OK for the job she sold it to you for, will get you kicked out.
Poor Communication
Beyond the constant over turn of mentors, the admin of APPA is also unresponsive, Most of the issues I have brought up have to do with questions that should have been dealt with someplace besides a Facebook group. However, when students reach out via email, the emails are simply not responded to. More recently, several students had reached out to Jules about an issue concerning certification and when she didn’t reply via email they reached out on Facebook (those get quick replies – even if the reply is to kick people off). Jules’s answer as to why she had not responded was that she had been tired, busy, had “hangryitus” and PMS. She asked them to wait a few more weeks for her response because she would be less busy then.
My Story
Clearly my story with APPA does not have a happy ending. I wish it did, I went in with very high hopes after my business partner completed APPA and wanted us to carry the same certification. While I had already done hundreds of placentas at this point, it seemed like a good business decision. I have summed up what happened with me in this post. At first I did not share my story. I own a doula training company and the very large Facebook group Love What You Doula. I was embarrassed that I could not work out my differences with APPA. I was kicked out the day I finished and Jules would not reply to my email requests about why. I offered to pay for a conflict resolution specialist (of her choice), I asked for the chance to apologize. I really wanted to make it right. However, this was my reply.