Covid-19 English courses FAQs

As of Saturday, October 17th 2020 face to face delivery of courses for teens and adults based in Warsaw and Krakow and adult courses in Wroclaw is moving to online delivery. As of Saturday, October 24th 2020 also courses for children (all Primary courses) in Warsaw, Krakow and Wroclaw and teens courses in Wroclaw will change to online delivery.

Until it is safe to resume face-to-face classes, we will teach you via virtual classrooms. All students should receive emails with information on how virtual classes work and how to use the online platform.

We are offering all students the option to continue learning through online virtual classrooms. We will do our best to ensure your course lessons take place at the same times, with the same teacher and classmates.

• ADULTS COURSES 
  Virtual classes will be conducted via Zoom (a web-conferencing tool). Zoom will allow you to practise your speaking and writing with your teacher and classmates in real time and do pair and group work, just as you would in a face-to-face lesson. All students should have received instructions on how to download Zoom via email instructions.
• SECONDARY & PRIMARY COURSES
  These virtual classrooms include live lessons with the teacher and self-study activities to be completed online before and after each live lesson. All parents/guardians should have received details on the secure, online learning platform via email to keep children safe while they are online.

Yes, you can reschedule if virtual classrooms are not a suitable alternative to your face-to-face course. If you would like to reschedule, please contact us via email.
We strongly recommend you (or your child) continue learning through our virtual classrooms to reduce disruption to their learning experience. Virtual lessons are proven way of learning a new language.

Online classes will be delivered within the agreed schedule and with the same teacher, so we hope children can attend the classes the same way as face to face. If the child cannot attend due to other reasons, including difficulties with access to needed equipment, please contact your teacher or our Customer Service team.

Since the Covid closure in Spring, we have been working hard to get prepared to smooth transition to online delivery. We are confident, we can introduce online learning in the same time whithout loosing any class, delivering all classes according to the schedule agreed. If there is a case of not delivering the lesson, we will come back with the proposal of new date to make it up or will credit you for the value of the missed classes. 

The exam preparation courses are moved online accordingly: all teens and adult exam preparation courses in Warsaw and Krakow and adult exam preparation courses in Wroclaw are moved online. As of October 24th 2020 also teens exam preparation courses in Wroclaw are moving to online delivery.

Our use of Zoom has been reviewed and signed off by our Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Safeguarding teams. The security of our staff and learners is our priority. Here are the measures in place to safeguard our customers who are taking lessons via Zoom.

• We prevent from Zoom-bombing – unwanted participants using the meeting link or URL to join a meeting.
• We ensure that unwanted guests cannot access our Zoom sessions – the waiting room is always active, and no one can access our virtual classroom without being admitted by the teacher. Just like in all our classes the teacher has a register of students, and will only admit those who are on the register.
• For English Online, there are further measures as the session is created in the EtonX platform and users can only access the Zoom session if they have log-on credentials for EtonX.
• We do not post public links to our lessons so that we do not share links beyond British Council staff and learners.
• We keep our Zoom client up to date to make sure we have the latest security patches.

Moreover:

• Chat – teachers have the ability to block chat if necessary, and private chat is never allowed.
• Screensharing - teachers have the ability to block screensharing, if necessary.
• Recording – we do not allow recording of sessions.

We will continue to monitor issues that may arise, and work to manage any risk on this or any other platform used for the delivery or our online offer.