Membership Agreement
This document was last updated on 31 January 2021 (Version 1.0)
We recommend that you print a copy of this document for your records at the time of registering for our online learning platform.
If you require access to any previous versions of this document, please contact us at hello@paradigmshift.training.
1. Introduction
We hope you will find our online learning platform useful for your studies.
Before signing up to the platform, please read the following set of Membership Agreement in full, as use of our platform will be deemed to constitute acceptance of the terms of the Membership Agreement stated in this document. You should also read our separately provided Terms of Use.
2. No charge for membership
We do not charge a fee for signing up to our platform. However, if you wish to access any of the paid content provided within the platform, you will need to pay the stated fee to obtain access. The expiry date of your access to the relevant resource will be clearly stated at the time of purchase.
3. Right to edit and delete Forum content
We reserve the exclusive right to monitor and edit the posts made in our Forum in order to ensure that the Forum promotes a respectful engagement between tutors and students. We may edit or remove any posts at our sole discretion.
For the avoidance of doubt, the statements of specific circumstances in which we may edit or delete Forum posts (see next section of this document) do not in any way limit our discretion to edit or remove any Forum content at our sole discretion.
4. Appropriate use of Forums
We provide free use of the Forum function of our online platform to help students ask questions and to serve as a searchable database of previously answered questions, which could also be informative to students.
We reserve the right to remove any Forum posts or comments which, in our reasonable judgement, are inconsistent with, and/or not sufficiently closely related to, the purpose of the Forum, which is to provide learning support to ICAEW CFAB and ACA students. For example, we kindly ask that you do not use the Forum to discuss events in daily life such as accountancy in general (including your own personal career or employer), politics, cultural or social matters or any similar content of a general nature. Our Forum is provided for the purpose of financial training only. We reserve the right to remove posts which we consider to be unrelated to this purpose.
We reserve the right to remove any posts or comments which, in our reasonable judgement, could be considered offensive or derogatory to other users of the Forum.
We reserve the right to remove any Forum posts or comments which advertise the learning materials or courses of other tuition providers. This is because we incur hosting and other costs to provide our Forum so we feel that it is reasonable not to want these efforts to advertise our competitors.
Furthermore, under the ICAEW Partner in Learning scheme, we are not permitted to comment on the learning materials or teaching services of any other ICAEW Partner in Learning and we take this restriction very seriously. We therefore ask that you do not raise any questions or topics which could put us in a position where we must comment on the resources or materials provided by another training provider. We reserve the right not to respond to any such questions and/or edit the relevant text as required to respect the ICAEW Partner in Learning scheme.
Use of the Forum is based around the username that you selected at the time of registration. We do not recommend that you disclose your real name or any other personal data on the Forum as the Forum is intended to be anonymous so that no matters of confidentiality and/or data protection are raised. In the event that you disclose any information of a personal nature and, in our reasonable judgement we do not think it is appropriate or necessary for you to have made such a disclosure, we reserve the right to delete the information and/or the post.
5. Response times
We will always endeavour to respond to any support questions raised on the online learning platform at the earliest opportunity.
We will try to reply to as many Forum questions as possible in the time available to us but for the avoidance of doubt, posting a message does not entitle you to receive a response from us as there may be circumstances in which we are unable to respond or your query may already have been answered by us in response to another student.
As we cannot anticipate when your support question may be received, and also cannot anticipate the exact content of your message (which could range from a purely technical issue with the online learning platform through to more complicated technical accounting queries, which can only be answered by a specialist tutor), we require a reasonable period of time to respond.
As we are sure you can appreciate, our support team becomes particularly busy in the weeks and days running up to the various examination sittings, with the current schedule of examination dates falling in March, June, July, September, November and December each year. It is our experience that most queries will be raised relatively close to examination day (even in cases where the query could have been raised earlier in time). We will always try our best to reply as soon as possible but please allow us a reasonable amount of time to do so, particularly during the busy periods stated here. Additionally, please help us manage our scarce tutor time by raising your queries at the earliest opportunity: please do not “store up” any questions to be released close to examination day as we may not be able to respond in time.
We reserve the right not to respond to any messages which are sent unreasonably close to examination day. We retain sole discretion of the determination of what constitutes “unreasonably close”.
6. Feedback
We are always happy to hear constructive feedback from students on how to improve our courses and materials provided on this online learning platform. We will always try to implement ideas where this is possible, practical and financially viable.
As our online learning platform is hosted by an external third-party software provider, there may be situations in which we will not be able to implement a suggestion, but we will discuss the idea as a feature request with them. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that any changes will be made to the platform as the platform is not created or coded by us.
7. Errata: notification and public statements
In registering to use our online learning platform, you agree to provide us with a reasonable opportunity to respond to any suggested errors or flaws in the materials within the platform. You also agree to provide us with a reasonable opportunity to respond to matters of this kind before posting a statement regarding this matter in our Forum or any publicly available viewing area of the online learning platform, or on any other public platform.
We will always try our utmost to minimise any errors in our materials but we hope you will appreciate that whilst we always aim for perfection, it is often not possible to achieve this. In line with the approach used by ICAEW when errors are identified in their materials, we will issue an Errata Sheet at the earliest opportunity and we will ensure that any affected students will be notified via a message within the online learning platform.
In our experience, sometimes it can be the case that an issue which the student believes is an error or a flaw in our technique does not turn out to be and error or flaw once we have had the opportunity to discuss the matter further. In the past, we have sometimes suffered from situations where the student has perhaps not read our materials in full, or has not understood some of the definitions or terminology used, or has appeared to reach a judgement quite quickly in relation to our materials. Such circumstances have resulted in incorrect negative comments on social media platforms which we have been unable to reply to.
In registering to use this online learning platform, you agree to work with us in a cooperative and patient manner so that, working together, we can promote our aim of providing the best possible online learning experience available anywhere in the market. We are sure that with your input and co-operation, combined with our own hard work and commitment, we can achieve this.
8. Service outages
The servers used to provide our online learning platform are hosted by Amazon Web Services, an industry pioneer in the provision of scalable cloud computing solutions, with industry leading rates of service uptime (exceeding 99.9%). As part of our tender process with the third-party provider of the software which powers our online learning platform, we were careful to select reliable server systems as demand for our online learning platform is likely to be extremely high in the run up to each examination sitting.
However, despite our best efforts, as well as those of our software provider and Amazon Web Services, there may occasionally be times when the online learning platform is unavailable including (but not limited to) scheduled server maintenance.
If the online learning platform is unavailable for a period of more than 10 minutes, please try to re-gain access later in the day. If you are still experiencing problems, please contact us immediately at: hello@paradigmshift.training.
9. Login sharing
In line with standard industry principles, your purchase of any of our online learning products (including, but not limited to, e-books, question banks, presentations, PDF documents and webinars) is for your sole personal use as a registered CFAB or ACA student.
We do not permit students to share login details and for this reason your IP address will be monitored to prevent unauthorised access to our online learning platform and materials. We reserve the right to close your account without prior notice if we identify that your login has been shared with other users. We reserve the right to report any such closure of your account to ICAEW as a breach of professional conduct.
For the avoidance of doubt, you have permission to open our online learning platform on any of your own personal devices and devices provided by your employer, provided you are the only viewer or user of the content once opened. Similarly, you have permission to simultaneously open the online learning platform on multiple personal and/or employer devices provided that all the devices are being used by you alone – for example, you may wish to have a browser window displaying an interactive video open whilst you simultaneously have another browser window displaying an e-book for reference. This is permissible provided that the online learning platform is being used by you alone.