How do Pharos Courses Work?

How do Pharos Courses Work?

There are three distinct types of course at Pharos Tutors:

• Anytime courses
• Tutor-led courses
• Certificate courses

Our most popular courses are the tutor-led and certificate courses and they all run in a very similar way.

Tutor-led and Certificate Courses 

There are three components to these courses:

• A weekly set of lesson notes
• An online course forum for class discussion and for posting your answers to the week's Exercises (in the lesson notes)
• A weekly tutorial with your tutor and other students on the course

The difference for the certificate courses is that there are also end of course assignments (which usually take a couple of weeks after the course has ended) and, for the Intermediate Certificate, some of the forum exercises are marked too.

During the week before a tutor-led or certificate course starts (anywhere between the day before and a week before, depending on tutor availability) you will receive a notification that your course has been "opened" by the tutor. You can log in to your Student Area and will see a number of blue buttons now available:

We open things early to give you a chance to try out the tech before things get started. The tutor will often post topics in the forum at this stage for you to read and respond to, such as introducing yourself or giving your availability for tutorial sessions.

What happens on day one?

On the course start date you will receive an email to let you know your lesson one notes are available. You access them in the "Course Materials" part of the Student Area. Rather than have you click from screen to screen to read these we supply the lesson notes as a downloadable pdf so that you can refer back to them after your course has finished. There will be reading to do, websites to visit and exercises to work on, the answers for most of which you will post in the online course forum.

If you have not already visited the forum, visit on day one of the course to see any topics already started by the tutor.

During the first few days of your course your tutor will finalise the dates and times for the weekly tutorials and add these to the Chat / Zoom part of the Student Area. Some of our tutorials use text-based chat, others run by Zoom. You will find both by visiting the Chat / Zoom area and just clicking the relevant "join now" button when the event starts.

All you need to do on day one of the course is get started on working through the lesson one notes.

During each week

During each week you will receive a set of lesson notes, work on the week's exercises and have a tutorial with your tutor to discuss that lesson's topics.

What about Anytime courses?

Anytime courses are slightly different. Some students get confused and think these are just a way to take a course, but in fact the Anytime courses are on different topics to our regular tutor-led and certificate courses. They are a collection of beginners' courses and standalone easy-to-follow courses, where tutor input is not required.

An Anytime course "does what it says on the tin". You are free to study the material on these courses in your own time - anytime in fact. There is no tutor and no course forum, you simply work through the notes, visiting websites, working on the exercises, and hopefully feeling inspired to go off and try things on your own family tree. The assessment of learning on an Anytime course is self-assessment. Each lesson has a quiz at the end to check understanding.

Take a look at our COURSE LIST list and see what sparks your interest today!