Online learning isn’t as effective as face-to-face learning.

Not only is this statement far too broad and vague, it’s also demonstrably false.

There are undoubtedly many online courses which are ineffective, but all-too-often the learning experience in a brick-and-mortar school for many students is also ineffective.  Think of your own experiences in school or college; Do you feel that you learned effectively from every one of your teachers all of the time? If so, you’re in the vanishingly small minority and are very, very lucky indeed!

The main reasons why a student does or doesn’t learn effectively (whether online or “face to face”) are not due to the where they learn – the effectiveness of education is far more dependent upon a combination of the quality of teaching they receive combined with their level of motivation, engagement and effort. 

This much should be obvious, and there are many studies which show that the students who tend to perform poorly in the physical classroom tend to also perform poorly online.

Consider also that young people today, even the most motivated and high-aiming students, simply don’t consume and retain information in the same formats or through the same mechanisms as they did just a decade or two ago.  There are a rapidly growing number of psychological and neurophysiological studies showing strong evidence to support this conclusion, and the fact that this makes young people today less amenable to the traditional model of face-to-face classroom instruction and far more amenable to learning online.

There are also many advantages of learning through an online course, especially when the course is effectively structured and provides quality learning materials, interactive content and qualified, expert teaching:

• No disruptions of lessons or lost teaching time due to bad behaviour of other students.
• More time to think and complete tasks in an online course, rather than being limited by the time frame of a physical classroom lesson, where a teacher needs to “get through” specific content by the end of the lesson, putting a time limit on each task in a lesson.
• Complete flexibility for the student; an online course can be studied and its learning tasks completed whenever and wherever the student wants, at a pace which is determined by the student. This is categorically NOT the case in brick and mortar school or college, where there are time limitations due to students and teachers having a set daily timetable of lessons of fixed length, and the consequent tight deadlines for the completion of each topic and each task set.
• The ability for a student to ask as many questions about a specific topic as they want, continuing their dialogue with their teacher for as long as they need to achieve a good understanding of the topic before moving onto the next topic or lesson. This is not the case in a physical classroom, where the time limit imposed on each lesson, the presence of 20-30 other students who also have questions, and the need to “cover the content” by the end of a lesson all severely limit a teacher’s available time to answer questions from individual students.
• More confidence to ask questions without worry of what their peers in the classroom might think, and more time to organise their thoughts before asking questions. Many students are more comfortable engaging in meaningful discussions online than in a classroom. These students might also have hearing or speech impairments; speak different languages; have social anxiety; or simply need more time to organize their thoughts.
• Better retention of information and more effective revision.  In a well-constructed online course, the lesson recordings, teaching videos, activities, assessments, feedback and other learning resources are available at a student’s fingertips 24/7 anywhere they choose to study, whereas when a student attends a lesson in a school classroom all they have to rely upon to ensure they don’t forget what they’ve been taught is their memory, together with whatever notes they’ve taken or class-work they’ve produced.
• The ability to use emergent technologies (such as AI and machine learning) to improve the tracking of students’ understanding and progress, identify students’ misconceptions, and personalise the learning journey for each student. Such technologies can also be used to provide detailed feedback for every activity a student engages with, which would be completely impractical in the traditional face-to-face classroom.
• The ability to use interactive activities, simulations, games and other tools to create learning experiences which would be difficult or impossible to deliver in the physical classroom.

The blanket statement that e-learning is less effective than learning in a classroom is not only false, but speaks to a complete unfamiliarity with truly effective, up-to-date e-learning technologies and educational methods.  For nearly two decades, giant corporations such as Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft (to name but a few) have been using the incredible flexibility and power of truly effective e-learning to successfully train their engineers, data scientists, analysts, marketers and so many other specialists online.

SURELY then, it’s possible to leverage those same technologies and approaches to successfully teach sciences to high school and college students in a way that guarantees more than just a “pass”?

OF COURSE it’s possible.  Not only is it possible, it’s entirely practical!  

The e-learning technologies and methods used by these industry giants are not (and have never been) proprietary secrets – these technologies and approaches have been public knowledge for nearly three decades – but they have only just started to trickle down into the higher education sector and universities in the last ten years, and the public school sector are even further behind, still stuck in the e-learning stone age.

These corporations don’t just sit their teachers in front of a webcam and deliver lessons to their students through online video-conferencing and call that “e-learning”.  They do so much more than that. They craft comprehensive online courses filled with rich, interactive content and use cutting edge technologies to process the data about their learners’ activities, progress and learning behaviours to better understand how they learn, identify gaps in their knowledge and skill, provide personalised feedback, and help uniquely tailor the experience for each learner’s needs.

Even the companies which currently offer online courses for school and college students in the UK are still way behind the curve. Part of the problem is the inevitable “gold rush” of companies hurriedly trying to produce e-learning offerings to capitalise on parents, students (and most recently, schools) desperately trying to fill the gaps in secondary education using technologies and educational approaches which the private sector have left in the dust decades ago.  Not only are most e-learning providers using antiquated and unengaging technology to deliver their “teaching”, but they’ve also not factored in the most recent data on how students learn and the emergent ways in which young people of today assimilate information.

With the UK’s education system struggling to adapt to the changing landscape of how students think and learn, and in the face of an increasing need for exactly such an effective online solution, it’s the most motivated and ambitious students which are being let down the most.

Truly effective e-learning isn’t just Skype calls or emails back and forth between a student and a “tutor”.  It isn’t just about watching “teaching” videos that promise to give you mastery of an entire module in less than an hour (and fail miserably).  It isn’t just web-pages of written material and diagrams together with the occasional set of exam questions you’re expected to complete, with “tick and flick” marking and unhelpfully vague or insubstantial feedback from dubious “tutors”.

E-learning WORKS.  Just ask Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple et al.  But most of what the uninformed call “e-learning” is outdated and ineffective, or just plainly NOT e-learning at all.

And that’s why I created Invisible College; to bring cutting edge e-learning technology and up-to-date, effective online education methods to GCSE and A-level science students, specifically the type of students who are being least served by the current status quo; the most able and the most motivated.

Online courses are all less personalised to individual students’ needs.

This is another sweeping statement which is often made about online education, and (like any such overly-generalised statements) is usually made by people who have very little understanding of the realities of “face to face” teaching and/or online teaching.

While it’s unquestionably true that there are many online courses which employ a “one size fits all” model, it is equally true that (in the vast majority of cases), so does the brick-and-mortar school system.

Whether the teacher is working in a physical classroom or online, one of the key attributes of effective pedagogy is “differentiation”; this is the term used in the education sector to describe the provision of tasks to each student which are designed to be specifically tailored to each student’s learning style and needs. 

The aim of differentiation is obvious; the more personalised the tasks provided to each student are to their specific needs, the more effectively a student will learn, the more rapidly they will progress and the higher their attainment will be. 

In the ideal case, then, each student will receive teaching, learning tasks and feedback which are uniquely tailored to them to ensure the most effective learning and facilitate the most rapid progress possible.

However, while most teachers strive to achieve the ideal of individually differentiated tasks for their students, the realities of life as a teacher in a brick-and-mortar school or college make this extremely difficult to achieve and equally difficult to sustain.

To illustrate why, let’s first consider the role of the average classroom science teacher in secondary education in the UK (and I speak from extensive experience)…

Consider that the average science teacher in a UK secondary school has anywhere from five to ten classes across all year groups to teach in their weekly timetable – let’s say an average of 8 classes.  Each class will have between 20-30 students in it – let’s say an average of 25 students.  This is a total of 200 students on average.

The teacher must not only plan lessons for each class (usually not less than 20 lessons per week), prepare the teaching resources for each lesson, and deliver the lessons, but must also mark and provide feedback to every single student.  This includes marking exercise books as well as end-of-topic test papers, homework, etc. 

In the average half-term, there will be three or more pieces of homework, a couple of test papers, and a couple of rounds of exercise book marking. 

Let’s assume each exercise book takes ten minutes to mark and provide feedback on, each test paper another ten minutes, and each homework another ten minutes per student (in fact, these often take longer, but let’s just be conservative).  Do the maths – that’s a total of more than 230 hours of marking and providing written feedback every six to eight weeks.  For most teachers, this amounts to anywhere from 30 to 40 hours per week spent marking and providing feedback (assuming the teacher doesn’t want to spend their hard-earned school holidays doing this!).

The average classroom teacher spends 22 hours per week teaching lessons.  Outside of this, there are the innumerable department meetings, year team meetings, pastoral meetings, time spent liaising with parents, professional training sessions, parents’ evenings, open evenings, performance management reviews, and other activities which take up a teacher’s time. 

Most teachers are busy doing everything BUT marking from 8am to 4pm five days a week.  Adding the marking onto this makes a total working week for the average classroom science teacher of anywhere from 70 to 80 hours a week!

Now imagine how much more time would need to be spent if that same teacher was teaching lessons where the tasks given to each student for classwork and homework were individually tailored to their specific needs (truly individually-tailored “differentiation by task”), and now you start to see why this is simply not feasible.

For most teachers, the extent to which they can truly provide personalised teaching within the secondary education system is severely limited by their already crushing workload and the sheer numbers of students they teach in their timetable. 

Consequently, for most classroom teachers, the ideal of truly individually personalised “differentiation by task” is just that – a largely unattainable ideal.  The closest most teachers get to this is to have “extra work” waiting for those students who complete a task early during a lesson (lessons in which the main activities are the same for all the students).

So, what about online education?  Can modern e-learning technologies and data analytics be used to “differentiate” more effectively?  The answer to this is a resounding YES…

Every action taken by a learner on one of my online courses generates data which is recorded and analysed – every mouse-click, every question attempted, every answer given, including the time taken by a student to watch a section of a teaching video, answer a question or submit an assignment, and so much more. 

This is all done automatically, and the data analysed to construct a detailed model of each student’s strengths and weaknesses, providing invaluable insight which can then be used to personalise that student’s next task, the feedback given to them, and structure their personal learning journey optimally to suit their needs.

This would simply be impossible for a “face to face” teaching situation, but can be done effortlessly online using machine-learning and AI.  This not only gives me much deeper insight into each student’s learning style and specific needs, but also frees up my time to actually interact with each student, answering questions, engaging them in constructive dialogue, providing personalised work and academic coaching.

Add to this the other advantages of learning online versus the physical classroom…

• The ability of a student to work through each lesson at their own pace and to learn the topics in a course in whatever order they wish,
• The ability to revisit lessons, activities and learning resources as many times as they want whenever they want,
• The ability to ask as many questions and have as many conversations with their teacher about the content of a specific lesson as they wish over however long a time they need.

… and it’s clear that, if anything, the ideal of truly individual “differentiation by task” is far more achievable online than it will ever be in a physical classroom.

Online courses involve less interaction between teacher & student.

To dispel this myth just takes a little logic and an honest review of your own experiences in the brick-and-mortar classroom.

The average GCSE or A-level student studying separate science subjects has between 3 and 5 lessons per week per science subject, let’s say 4 hours a week of in-classroom teaching, with an average of 39 weeks of teaching per academic year.  That’s an average of 312 teaching hours over a 2-year period.

Most exam boards suggest a minimum of 120 hours of teaching for a 2-year GCSE course and at least 360 hours of teaching for a 2-year A-level course.  Taking into account an average of 25-30 end-of-topic formative assessments, revision lessons, mock exams and other aspects of a course which all need to be delivered during timetabled teaching hours, this leaves very little “wiggle room” for teachers to fully cover the content of a course in the time available to them.

This in turn means that each 1-hour lesson in a physical classroom has clear “learning objectives” which must be achieved by the students within that one hour period of teaching, and teachers are under enormous pressure to “cover the content” for each lesson of the course within that one-hour period or risk their classes falling behind.  Once the class moves onto the next lesson in the sequence of that topic, the teacher rarely if ever has time to revisit concepts they covered in a previous lesson if a student (or even the entire class) has not fully understood them.

Add to this the fact that each class will have, on average, between 20 and 30 students in it, and it’s clear that the amount of time each student has to engage personally with the teacher during a specific lesson (to ask questions and receive answers and personalised teaching) is severely limited.

Think of your own experiences as a student in school – how much time, on average, did your teacher spend in dialogue with you personally during a lesson?  How many questions were you able to ask and have answered during a lesson before the time constraints of the lesson forced your teacher to move on to another student or to move ahead with the next activity in that lesson?

Simply being in the same physical classroom as the teacher does not mean that each student was in constant, personal dialogue with the teacher during the whole lesson experience.  In fact, this is rarely (if ever) the case.

Now let’s consider how the experience of learning online can be different.

Well-crafted online courses in which a combination of interactive learning content and teacher guidance have significant advantages in this regard.

In such an online course, the fact that there is no strict schedule or time-limit for a student to work through the content of a specific lesson, and the fact that the student can complete the topics in a course in a sequence of their own choice, allows students to correspond with their teacher whenever they wish, as many times as they wish, and in as much detail as they wish.

Thus, the student can be entirely satisfied that their questions are answered and that they have achieved a strong understanding of the content of a lesson before they progress to the next one, with no time-pressure and no limit to how deeply they wish to explore the content of a lesson in dialogue with their teacher.

In addition to this powerful advantage over face-to-face learning, any and all dialogue between the teacher and student is securely stored and can be viewed again by the student at any later date (chat transcripts, private messages, recordings of live online sessions, etc.), which is something that brick-and-mortar teaching can’t match; how many question and answer interactions with your teachers do YOU remember word-for-word?

Another often-overlooked aspect of online learning versus learning in a physical classroom is the enormous amount of time saved by the teacher (and therefore available for the students) due to their not having to deal with interruptions to their teaching due to poor behaviour disrupting lessons.  For the majority of students and teachers in secondary schools and FE colleges, this is a massive drain on their available learning time and focus which simply does not occur when studying through an online course.

Also, for many students, being able to engage with a teacher to ask questions and discuss ideas while working through an online course removes the anxiety associated with doing so in a physical classroom.

Many students feel reticent to raise their hand to ask a question for fear of seeming “too keen”, “looking silly”, or simply due to social anxiety when they have 20-30 of their peers as an audience in a physical classroom, while the privacy and comfort of doing so with their teacher in an online course (including publicly while attending live online lessons with other students) removes this anxiety.

Finally, a well-constructed online course offers many more ways for students and teachers to interact with each other than a physical classroom.  For example, students who are enrolled on my interactive courses with private coaching routinely communicate with me via the following methods:

• Each lesson in my online courses has a “live chat” function through which students can make comments and raise questions about the content of that lesson, to which I can respond with answers or comments of my own. This is also useful because students can start useful discussions with each other as well as with myself about the topics covered.
• Each student has the ability to send me private messages with their questions, to which I can respond privately.
• Each student has their own private coaching area in which they can send me voice messages or even videos where they ask questions, which I can respond to with voice or video messages of my own.
• Students can engage with me each week in a live online lesson where we can see and hear each other, share our computer screens to illustrate problems or work on specific tasks, and interact with each other in real time.
• Students can email me with their questions and comments and receive a response by email.

In many of these methods of communication, students are able to take their time and carefully think through and formulate their questions or comments before sending them – this is not always possible in the physical classroom where time is limited and there is a pressure on teachers and students alike to complete tasks and cover content within the time allotted to that lesson.

You need to be “tech-savvy” to study online.

This is perhaps the easiest myth to debunk;  If you can use a keyboard and mouse to browse the web, you can access everything in any of my online courses and make full use of all the features contained in them.

You can access and study through my online courses on any device (smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer).

I’ve even had students use their smart TV’s or video game consoles to study through my courses!

To access my live online lessons and webinars, again all that’s required is a web browser; though you can also access additional functionality in these live teaching sessions by using an app, this is not a strict requirement.  If a student wants to be able to interact using their voice and be seen and heard by other students and myself, they’ll need a webcam with a microphone, but this isn’t essential (although if you’ve used Skype, WhatsApp, Zoom or Microsoft Teams before then you’ve already got everything you need to do this anyway).

In short, if you’re reading this and browsing this website, you’ve already got everything you need – no special skills, training, knowledge or equipment is necessary.

There are even detailed tutorials in each of my interactive courses to show you how to access them and use the learning resources within them effectively.

Finally, for students enrolled on my online courses with private coaching, as your teacher I’m available to lend a helping hand if you have any questions, whether it’s by online chat, private message, ‘phone call, email or online video call!

Online courses aren’t as challenging as face-to-face courses.

While this may be true of some online courses, it’s certainly NOT true of the online courses here; these interactive online courses are designed to challenge students to excel not only at their current level of education (be that GCSE or A-level) but to set them up with a level of scientific knowledge and skills which will ensure they start the next level of their education at the top of their class.

To be clear, one of the main reasons this site exists is because I wanted to be able to teach my students to greater degree of breadth and depth than I could within the restrictions imposed on schools and colleges by the UK’s National Curriculum.

I wanted to be able to serve the students who I felt were being most let down by the current status-quo; namely, the most able and/or most motivated students, who were (in my experience) those who were the least well-served by the one-size-fits-all model most prevalent in secondary science education.

I wanted to create a platform which would not only stretch and challenge the most gifted and/or motivated, but would allow me to realise my passion for science teaching by enabling me to explore the topics I teach to a depth only limited by my students’ ambition and interest, rather than by the limitations defined by the politics and exigencies inherent in the public school system.

Consequently, every aspect of the teaching and learning content within these online courses is designed to that end – to provide a level of depth, breadth and scientific rigor which brings students up to the level of scientific proficiency required to achieve the highest possible grade (level 9 at GCSE and A* at A-level) and then to take them beyond even that.

For example, many of the learning tasks, questions and other activities in the GCSE courses here will take students well beyond GCSE content and into A-level content, and the A-level courses here will take students to first- and second-year undergraduate university content.

The learning tasks students will find here therefore offer much more challenge than they’ll find elsewhere, but the online courses here will also provide them with much more in-depth teaching and learning resources to ensure that they can confidently meet and overcome that challenge; the only limitation on their progress is their own level of effort and commitment

Cheating in tests & exams is easier in online courses.

Cheating in online assessments was, in the past, a significant problem in online education, but in recent years advances in technology have largely resolved this problem.

For example, when students submit assignments in electronic form, they can automatically be checked to detect plagiarism; many universities have been using software to do this for many years, and this is even easier to implement in online courses where all assignments are submitted electronically.  

This has effectively eliminated the ability of students to simply “copy and paste” information from online sources into their assignments and other submitted work – such software is even able to detect when a student had attempted to “cover up” their plagiarism by lazily paraphrasing an online source without giving credit to that source, passing someone else’s work off as their own.

Browser-blocking software can also be used by online course providers when delivering online assessments to ensure students are not “looking up answers” online when doing interactive quizzes or other online assessments.

However, a far more effective method to eliminate online cheating, particularly when students are completing online assessments, is simply to ensure those assessments are well thought-out and carefully designed in such a way that it’s actually more of an effort to cheat than it is to take the assessment honestly.

For example, in addition to the above strategies to minimise the risks of plagiarism and cheating, the interactive quizzes and assessments in the online courses on this website are designed with a number of other features which make it not only extremely difficult but effectively pointless and actually counter-productive to cheat. Some of the strategies used on this website are listed below:

• Careful wording and construction of questions which require written or numerical answers such that answers cannot be simply found using a search engine (or such that the use of a search engine would be far too time-consuming and would result in the student running out of time during the test, leaving the majority of questions unanswered, and failing the test as a result).
• Careful choice of question styles, many of which require complex manipulation of interactive content by the student to answer the question rather than simply factual recall.  These include question styles such as image hotspot questions, simulations, matching tiles questions, and many others.  For these styles of questions there is no feasible way of using any resource (such as a search engine or textbook) to cheat effectively.
• Restrictive time limits for each assessment, which have been chosen as a result of trialling each assessment with multiple student groups. In these trials, some students were encouraged to “cheat” (by having textbooks open, conferring with other students using their ‘phones or instant messaging apps, or using search engines to help them answer the questions), while other student groups had done the requisite revision and study, and were attempting the tests fairly without cheating.  The resulting data from these trials was analysed to reveal the optimal time limit which would ensure that only students who were responding to questions based on their own knowledge and problem solving are likely to complete all the questions in time, while those students using any method to “cheat” would invariably run out of time and end up not completing enough questions to pass the test.  Essentially, it takes far longer to find an answer to a question by cheating than it does for a student who had done the necessary work and revision to answer the questions honestly – the time limits for each assessment are carefully optimised such that there is just enough time for the “honest” students to complete the test and nowhere near enough time for a cheating student to do so.
• The assessments in the online courses on this website use an “AI” engine and machine learning algorithms to personalise the questions presented to each student according to their learning behaviours and needs. For example, the first time a student attempts a quiz which tests their understanding of a specific lesson, the questions which will be presented to them will be randomly selected from a large bank of questions on that topic.  The next time they re-attempt that quiz, questions will be non-randomly selected which target the specific areas of knowledge or skills the student needs to work on within that topic (as identified by the ML and AI analysis of their previous attempt).  This means that each time a student attempts the same quiz, the quiz will change to adapt itself to the learner’s needs and maximise their progress, but what this also means is that no two students can effectively cheat on the same quiz together, since neither one will be presented with the same questions in the same order, thereby making collusion pointless.

These are a few of the strategies used in the online courses on this website to prevent cheating; there are many others which are used to reliably detect the attempt to cheat and/or prevent students from doing so which are used on this website.

Good instructional design and careful construction of the assessments used in online courses can not only make cheating just as difficult (if not more so) than in a physical classroom, but can also make it far more trouble than it’s worth!

Finally, if and when attempted cheating or plagiarism by any student on this website is detected, this violates the terms and conditions of service which that student agreed to; per the terms of service, that student will forfeit their enrolment fees, their account will be deleted, and all access to their online courses will be permanently blocked. Educational institutions such as schools, colleges, universities and exam boards generally have a “zero tolerance” policy on cheating in assessments, and the same goes here.  This is a final, strong deterrent to any student considering cheating in any online assessment here.

This, together with the extremely effective technologies and strategies used on this website to prevent and detect cheating, allow me to say with confidence that (at least here), this particular myth about online courses is most definitely FALSE.  

In fact, it would be far easier to cheat and get away with it in a brick-and-mortar exam than it would be in any of the online courses on this website, and I say this after having had many years of experience working as an examiner for the major awarding bodies in the UK.

Online teachers are all less qualified.

This is a statement which is ALMOST true – ALMOST, but not quite entirely.  

Once again, it’s a broad and sweeping statement which may be true of many (even most) of the people who “teach” or “tutor” students through online courses for GCSE or A-level subjects, but it’s certainly not true of ALL online teachers.

I invite you to carefully read the claims made by other providers of online GCSE and A-level science courses; You’ll notice that, when describing the person the student will be taught by, they most often use the terms “tutor” or “subject specialist” or “expert”, but rarely “teacher”. 

Rarely (if ever) will you see in black and white a guarantee that the person who will be your guide through their online course will be ALL of the following…

• A fully qualified and experienced UK classroom teacher, with a recognised teaching qualification, such as a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education), and with QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) and GTC (General Teaching Council) accreditation .
• Fully enhanced-CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) checked; this is a legal requirement for all teachers or staff in schools and colleges who work routinely with children
• A holder of higher education degrees (at least at bachelors level if not at masters level or higher) in their field of teaching specialism.  For example, a chemistry teacher should hold at least a good bachelors degree (2:1 or, preferably, a first class degree with honours) in chemistry.

The above criteria are, for most “good” or “outstanding” UK schools and colleges, the bare minimum requirements for a person to be employed as a classroom teacher – why settle for anything less online?

I encourage you to contact any other UK provider of online science courses for GCSE and A-level students and simply ask them if their “tutors” or “subject specialists” match the above criteria – you’ll find few if any which will answer that question with an unambiguous “yes” for all of the above criteria.

The reason for this “weasel-wording” by most online course providers is simple; most of them (in fact, as far as I can tell, pretty much ALL of them) don’t employ fully qualified UK classroom teachers.  

Instead, their “tutors” and “subject specialists” are usually undergraduate university students or postgraduates looking for an online “gig” to make some additional income. 

Such “tutors” are not paid fixed wages, instead being paid £8-10 per assignment to mark students’ work.  This is far too low an income for a fully qualified teacher, given that teaching in a brick-and-mortar school or college would provide them with a much higher salary with much better job security.

Fully qualified and experienced classroom teachers are rarely (if ever) found acting as “tutors” for online course providers because they are simply too expensive – such companies wouldn’t make sufficient profit if all their “tutors” were actually fully qualified teachers. 

The problem is that, despite impressively worded sales copy which promises “highly knowledgeable” individuals acting as your “tutors” and “available 24/7” to provide “personalised” learning to all students, it’s a fact that there is a world of difference between the quality of teaching a student receives from a fully qualified and experienced teacher compared with what they can receive from an intelligent undergraduate or postgraduate with good subject knowledge but with no formal teacher training, qualifications, professional teaching accreditation or classroom experience.  Simply knowing the subject matter does not make a good teacher!

In fact, you should ideally be far more demanding if you’re searching for an elite-level online teacher to ensure you get the kind of high-quality online education to ensure you attain the highest possible grades; you should also be looking for other professional attributes in addition to those listed above, such as:

• A holder of higher education degrees in the field of education (again, at least at bachelors level) – for example, BEd or MEd in science education
• A teacher with experience actually working as an examiner for the UK awarding bodies (the so-called “exam boards”, such as AQA, Edexcel and OCR)
• A teacher with extensive knowledge of online teaching and learning, e-learning technologies and online pedagogy

Okay, hopefully all of this establishes that this myth is ALMOST always true – at least, with the “tutors” available with other online course providers.  Where this myth is FALSE is right here at Invisible College.

Not only do I satisfy ALL of the above criteria (you can find some of my credentials here), but unlike any of the dubious “tutors” or “subject specialists” employed by any of my competition, I’m personally responsible for every detail of the online courses on this website, including every aspect of their content, design, delivery and evaluation. 

Unlike the “tutors” employed by other online course providers, I don’t just collect a pay-cheque from an employer who has hired me to mark assignments submitted by students in an online course I had nothing to do with the creation of.  

I’m completely and personally invested in these online courses after having spent over twelve thousand hours producing them.  I’m utterly committed to facilitating academic excellence for each and every one of my students, and I’m proud to put my name and face (and stake my reputation) on my courses and the teaching I provide.

While this myth, as stated, may be true of most (if not all) online course providers, I like to think of my online courses and myself as being an exception which disproves the rule.

I cordially challenge you to find another online course provider for GCSE and A-level sciences who employs a “tutor” or “subject specialist” who can match my qualifications, experience and expertise, but be warned; I’ve tried REALLY long and hard to find one and haven’t succeeded, so be prepared for a long (and probably fruitless) search!

Studying through an online course is always a lonely experience.

This is yet another overly-simplistic and generalised statement; on the surface level, it’s true that many online courses can be more isolating for a student than being in a physical classroom with their peers.

However, this is not true of ALL online courses, and it is certainly not a flaw inherent to online education.  When students have this feeling, it’s most often due to poorly designed courses and/or lack of functionality of the online platforms through which the courses are delivered.

Certainly “distance learning” used to be a rather lonely affair in the past, and more out-of-date styles of online courses can still feel like ghost towns for students, but modern web-based technologies allow for the creation of online courses which enable students to interact in multiple ways, many of which would be difficult or impossible in a physical classroom.

For example, students who are enrolled on the interactive online courses at this website can communicate with each other and collaborate in their studies in the following ways:

• Each lesson within a course contains its own live chat, which students can use to comment or ask questions about any aspect of that lesson, and within which I can answer questions or reply to comments. This also allows students to discuss different aspects of the ideas and principles presented in the lesson with each other, help each other solve problems and complete assignments, or just have useful discussions in general where I can also get involved as required by my students.

• Students can interact with myself and each other once a week in a live online lesson, delivered through an industry-leading online video conferencing platform allowing students to see and hear each other as well as their teacher, ask questions and learn together. Students can also use this platform to organise online video calls amongst themselves for the purposes of group-study or collaboration on specific learning tasks.

• Each student has their own profile page within this website, which they can customise just like a profile page on a social network. Students can interact with each other via their profile pages to discuss topics they are learning, form study-groups to help each other with learning tasks and revision, etc.  This essentially provides a completely secure and learning-oriented social network within the website which students can use to interact with each other to facilitate group-learning activities

While it can be awkward for students to break the ice, with the right incentives many students find more confidence expressing themselves in writing than in spoken words.  This may make online education more comfortable way for introverts to bond with their classmates than traditional classrooms.

These types of online communication also have the advantage that students can be selective about who they choose to communicate with, rather than having the peers they share a classroom with and who they sit next to selected for them by the school or college they attend.  Students can communicate and make friends with other students in other cities or even other countries. 

Another advantage of this online model of student collaboration and communication is that students of different age groups and levels of education can communicate with each other, which is not possible in a physical classroom where year groups are separated.  For example, while many of my GCSE students communicate with each other, they can also ask for help from some of my A-level students, who are often only too happy to help!  In this way, students from across age ranges and levels of education can augment each other’s learning in a way which generally doesn’t happen in physical classrooms.

Yet another advantage is that the lines of communication between students are always open online – students can communicate with each other at any time of day, any day of the week, and can do so from any location where they can use a device with an internet connection.

Finally, consider that even a student who does no online learning at all often uses many of these same methods to communicate with their friends via their smartphone or computer after school on weekdays, on the weekends and during school holidays.  Young people today are very comfortable with using online chat, forums, social networks and online voice/video communication apps (such as WhatsApp, Skype, etc.) to communicate with each other when they are not in each other’s physical presence.  By providing similar ways of communicating within my online courses and on this website, students can feel completely at ease that they are never more than a few clicks away from their peers and can engage them in meaningful and fruitful dialogue while they study.

Online courses are all expensive and don’t offer value for money.

Once again, we can dispel this particular myth with a simple exercise in logic together with a few simple web searches comparing the costs of online courses to learning in traditional brick-and-mortar schools and colleges.

Public school education in the UK is ostensibly free of charge, but there are also private schools which charge hefty fees of anything from £10,000 to £25,000 per year.  Having worked as a teacher in both public and private schools, I can honestly say that there are schools of both types which offer highly effective teaching, but there are equally schools of both types which fail their students miserably in terms of the quality of education their students receive. 

It’s equally true that the cost of online learning can range from being free of charge to being very expensive, and the quality of online teaching and learning resources such as online courses is also a spectrum which ranges from utterly useless to undeniably effective. 

In the age of the internet, at least in theory, a student who is sufficiently motivated, organised, diligent and self-disciplined can find thousands of web pages, forums, videos and other content free of charge which cover almost any aspect of any subject or topic, and can explore those topics to any depth they desire.  However, in practice, this free content is of variable quality and usefulness, and requires huge amounts of time to locate using search engines and to cross-check between sources for validity and accuracy. 

Online courses for GCSE and A-level students from most of the established providers range in price from £200 to £2500 per subject (some costing even more). These generally provide not only better quality and more comprehensive resources than those that a student could find from online sources which are free-of-charge, as well as providing both a structured sequence of learning activities to work through as well as at least some level of guidance from an online “tutor”.

At these prices, it’s actually cheaper to enrol a student for all their subjects on separate online courses (even if you choose the more expensive ones) than it is to have them attend a private school for their GCSE’s or A-levels.

So just by crunching these numbers, it’s clear that overall (considering all options which involve paying for education), online learning is in fact cheaper.  The reason for this is simple – online courses don’t have anywhere near the overheads and costs associated with running brick-and-mortar schools and colleges.

However, as with brick-and-mortar schools (both public and private), the price-tag of an online course alone is not always a good predictor of its quality, nor is it a predictor of the effectiveness of the online “tutors” who are employed to assist students in such courses, nor is it a predictor of the progress and attainment a student can expect from such a course.

Given how this particular myth is often stated, let’s consider what people mean when they use the words “expensive” or “value for money”.

“Expensive” is, of course, an entirely relative term; an amount of money charged for a particular service may seem insignificant for some people but excessive for others.  It’s far more useful to consider whether the service you’re paying that sum of money to buy is actually worth it – does it actually offer “value for money”?

In the context of educational services, this then naturally leads to the questions:

• How much is effective education for your child (online or otherwise) actually worth to you?
• When looking at a private school’s prospectus or examining the online courses on offer from a particular provider, what are their features and benefits, and what would you be willing to pay for them?
• How credible are the claims being made by school or online course provider? What guarantees do they offer regarding your satisfaction with their services?
• When assessing the price and the value for money offered by a particular private school or online course provider, what makes them special? After all, you have many options in either field; is there anything that a particular provider can offer you that is unique or outstanding in some way?

In the final analysis, the answers to such questions can only be arrived at by the prospective buyer of such services doing their own due diligence, and each person’s viewpoint will differ based on their own priorities and financial situation.

In the case of the services and online courses offered here, I’m convinced (as are my clients and students) that not only are my online courses unique in their depth and breadth of content, unique in the fact that they are specifically designed to stretch the most able and/or motivated students, but also completely unique in their functionality and design.  

Having spent years building an online learning platform to realise the potential of e-learning technologies for GCSE and A-level science students – in a way that neither the brick-and-mortar school system nor my online competitors can match – I can confidently guarantee that my website and online courses offer more unique features and learning content than can be found from any other online provider at any price (and I’ll happily reduce my enrolment fee for you by 50% if you can prove me wrong in this).  

I also offer a 100% money-back guarantee if you choose to cancel your enrolment in any of my online courses for any reason within 14 days (see below).