What's a Dreaming Spires Course Like?

We've been running these courses so long, we sometimes forget to explain the basics. We think everyone knows that our courses always start the second week of September and finish the second full week of May, and last 30 weeks long.

We finish in mid-May because I like my summers!

We also think everyone knows that our courses are one hour of live instruction online each week: an extra half-hour on top of that if the course has an add-on extension.

Except for foreign language courses, the homework is usually four hours to be spread out over the whole week, and most of it is reading, the books for which are generally engaging living books: no textbooks here! The written part is fairly low key and graded on whether it's done or not - should the quality be less than amazing, we work with individual students to improve, but it doesn't affect their grade.

For foreign language, there's more conversation and practice partnerships than there is reading.

In every course, we bring our expertise and enthusiasm for a subject, and if students are struggling with a concept or are interested in exploring down a rabbit trail, we can slow down and address these desires. The syllabus has been created by ourselves so there's no hard-and-fast rule about what has to be covered on it, other than wanting to do justice to the subject by covering what should be covered for students to understand it best.

There is, however, no one right way to achieve it, but our tutors have a whole chest of tools to use along the way, and teaching students how to use them, too, is our ultimate objective.