The same small class, in your own kitchen, twice a week.
Our online groups are ordinary Brightpath classes delivered live by video. Eight learners, one teacher, cameras on, ninety minutes a session, two sessions a week for ten weeks. Every session is recorded, and the recordings stay in your lesson library for the whole term so you can watch a lesson again on the train.
- 90 minutes × 2 a week
- Max 8 per class
- Runs in your browser
- Recordings in HD
A class, not a video course
This is worth being clear about, because the phrase “online course” usually means something entirely different. You are not buying access to a set of pre-recorded videos and a quiz. You are enrolling on a real class with a real teacher and seven other adults, at a fixed time, every week for ten weeks, exactly as if you had walked up Cobbler's Row and sat down at the table in Room 2.
The syllabus is the same, the coursebook is the same, and the teacher is one of ours — Elena, Marc, Ines, Rui or Sarah — teaching from the studio on the second floor. The eight-learner cap is the same, for the same reason: in a group of eight everybody speaks for roughly a third of the lesson, and that arithmetic does not change because the table is virtual.
The one real difference is the shape of the week. In the building, a group meets once for a hundred and five minutes. Online, the same course is split into two ninety-minute sessions a week, usually Tuesday and Thursday or Monday and Wednesday. We tried it the other way round for two terms and the feedback was unanimous: a single long evening in front of a screen is much harder work than the same time in a room. Two shorter sessions also mean twice as many chances to speak, and Thursday can pick up whatever went wrong on Tuesday.
So an online course is ten weeks, twenty sessions and thirty contact hours, against seventeen and a half in the building — a good deal more time with a teacher, which is why we do not charge much less than the in-person fee despite having no room to heat.
Everybody's camera stays on. All ninety minutes.
It is the single condition we attach to an online place, we mention it before you pay rather than after, and it is the thing that makes an online Brightpath group work like a Brightpath group.
What we do not ask
We do not care what is behind you, whether you have changed out of your work clothes, or whether you are eating your dinner. Blur or replace your background if you would rather; nobody minds and nobody comments. Turn the camera off for a few minutes if you need to answer the door.
Nobody is monitoring anything: the rule describes the ordinary state of a session, not a test you can fail. If it is genuinely impossible for you, tell us before you enrol and we will be honest about whether an online group is the right choice at all.
What you need to join a class
Short version: a computer or tablet made in roughly the last seven years, a browser you keep updated, a room where you can talk out loud, and a home internet connection that will hold up for ninety minutes at a stretch with everyone's video running. The connection is the one that catches people out, so it is first on the list.
The bandwidth, in one paragraph
A live class with eight cameras on is a genuinely heavy piece of video. Each incoming person is an HD stream of roughly 1.5 to 2.5 Mbit/s, and in gallery view you are receiving all of them at once, so a full group settles at around 9 to 12 Mbit/s coming down and 2 to 3 Mbit/s going up for your own camera. That is sustained for the full ninety minutes rather than arriving in short bursts, and it happens twice a week. We recommend a home connection of at least 25 Mbit/s down and 5 Mbit/s up so that there is headroom for whoever else is in the house, and we would not advise trying it on anything under 10 Mbit/s down.
Your connection
- Recommended: 25 Mbit/s or better down, 5 Mbit/s or better up.
- Workable: 15 Mbit/s down and 3 Mbit/s up, if nobody else in the house is streaming at the same time.
- Not advisable: under 10 Mbit/s down. The picture will hold but the sound will break up, and broken sound is fatal in a language class.
- Latency matters as much as speed. Under about 60 ms it feels like a conversation; over 150 ms and people begin talking over each other.
- Wired beats wireless. If you can put a cable in for the ninety minutes, do. If not, sit in the same room as the router rather than two floors above it.
- Mobile tethering works surprisingly well on a good signal, but watch the data allowance — see the table below.
Your equipment
- A laptop, desktop or tablet. A phone will technically join, but the gallery is unusable and you will not be able to read the shared handouts.
- A current version of any mainstream browser. Nothing to download and nothing to install.
- Headphones with a microphone. The single biggest improvement most learners make. Laptop speakers cause echo, and echo suppression cuts out the quiet speakers — who, in a language class, are exactly the people who most need to be heard.
- A camera. The one built into the lid is fine.
- A room where you can speak out loud without whispering. This matters more than any hardware on this list.
- Something to write on. Most online learners keep a paper notebook and we encourage it.
| What you are doing | Down | Up | Data per 90-minute session |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audio only, no video anywhere | 0.1 Mbit/s | 0.1 Mbit/s | about 70 MB |
| Speaker view, one HD camera at a time | 2 Mbit/s | 2 Mbit/s | about 1.6 GB |
| Gallery view, small group of four | 5 Mbit/s | 2 Mbit/s | about 2.8 GB |
| Gallery view, full group of eight (the normal case) | 9–12 Mbit/s | 2–3 Mbit/s | about 6 GB |
| Breakout room, two or three people | 4 Mbit/s | 2.5 Mbit/s | pro rata, about 2.5 GB/hr |
| Teacher sharing a document alongside video | +1.5 Mbit/s | — | adds roughly 0.7 GB |
Adding it up over a term
Two sessions a week at around six gigabytes each is roughly twelve gigabytes a week of live class, or about 120 gigabytes across a ten-week term. Add the recordings — see below — and a learner who rewatches one lesson a week will use something in the region of 150 to 170 gigabytes over the course.
On any ordinary home broadband package this is unremarkable and nobody notices it. On a metered connection, a mobile data plan or a rural satellite service with a monthly cap, it is not unremarkable at all, and it is far better to work that out in August than in week four. If you are unsure what your allowance is, check before you enrol; if it turns out to be tight, tell us and we will talk you through the lower-bandwidth options.
If your connection is limited
None of this is all-or-nothing. There are three settings we can help you with, and between them they cover almost everybody:
- Cap the incoming video quality. Dropping the gallery from HD to standard definition takes the full-group figure from about 10 Mbit/s to about 4 Mbit/s, at a cost in sharpness that most people stop noticing by week two.
- Switch to speaker view. Receiving only the person talking rather than all eight roughly halves the load again.
- Fetch recordings on a better connection — at work, at a relative's house, at the library — rather than streaming them at home in the evening.
Rui runs a free fifteen-minute connection check in the week before every term starts. It is a real call on the real platform with a real camera, and it will tell you in five minutes whether your evenings are going to be pleasant or infuriating.
It runs in the browser. There is nothing to install.
This was not a marketing decision. It was that a third of our online learners join from a work laptop they are not allowed to install anything on, and another third would simply not have come back after being asked to invent an account and a password.
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You get a link
One web address for your group, emailed when you enrol and repeated in every weekly summary. It is the same link for all twenty sessions of the term, so it can live in your calendar or your bookmarks and you never have to hunt for it.
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You click it, and type your name
The class opens in a tab. No download, no plug-in, no installer, no account, no password. Your browser asks permission to use the camera and microphone — that is the browser asking, not us — and you say yes. Then you type whatever you want to be called in the room, and that is the entire sign-in.
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You check your sound
A ten-second panel to pick a microphone and a camera and see yourself before anybody else does. Most problems are solved here, and the room opens fifteen minutes early precisely so that you can solve them without an audience.
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The lesson happens
Gallery view, breakout rooms for pair work, a shared panel for handouts and the board, and a chat column that the teacher uses for spelling things out. Ninety minutes with a five-minute break at the halfway mark, and the room stays open for ten minutes afterwards.
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The recording appears
Usually within two hours, occasionally by the following morning, in your lesson library at the same web address. The one-page weekly summary sheet arrives the next day exactly as it does for the groups in the building.
Every session, recorded, and yours to rewatch all term
This began as a favour to two learners who worked shifts and could not always make a Tuesday. It is now the part of the online course that people mention most often on the end-of-term form, and roughly seven learners in ten use it at least once a fortnight.
What gets recorded, and for how long
The main room only: the teacher, the shared board and handouts, and the whole-group discussion. Breakout rooms are never recorded, which is deliberate — pair work is where people are most willing to be wrong out loud, and a camera in that corner would spoil it.
A ninety-minute session becomes a single video with a short list of chapter marks: new material, controlled practice, break, free practice, error clinic. Most learners who rewatch do not watch the whole thing; they jump to the twelve minutes where the subjunctive was explained and watch that twice.
Recordings stay in your library for the term and for six weeks afterwards, then delete automatically. Only the eight learners in that group and the teacher can see them; they are never public, never shared with other groups and never used in marketing. Anyone who would rather not appear can say so in week one and it is arranged quietly. The full detail is in the privacy notice.
Watching them
Playback is in the same browser tab, with no download required and nothing to install. The default is 1080p, because a language recording is mostly a person's face and a whiteboard, and both go to mush at low resolution — you cannot read an accent mark on a blurred board, and you cannot see a mouth shape at all.
| Quality | Rate | Per session |
|---|---|---|
| 1080p, the default | 5–6 Mbit/s | about 3.5 GB |
| 720p | 2.5–3 Mbit/s | about 1.8 GB |
| 480p | 1 Mbit/s | about 0.7 GB |
| Audio only | 0.1 Mbit/s | about 70 MB |
You can drop the quality from the player if the connection is busy, and you can slow playback to 0.75× without the pitch going strange. Offline downloads are available for the current week's two sessions, so you can fetch them on a good connection and watch on a train; they expire when the term's library does.
The ten minutes you lost
Somebody rings the doorbell at 19:40 and you come back to find the class has moved on. Rather than asking the teacher to repeat it on Thursday in front of seven other people, you open Tuesday's recording, drag to 19:38 and watch four minutes.
This is what the library is mainly for, it is a completely ordinary thing to do, and it is the reason we record every session rather than only the ones a teacher happens to think are important.
Listening practice you already understand
Rewatching a lesson you sat in is unusually good listening practice, because you already know what happened and can therefore afford to pay attention to how it was said rather than to what it meant.
Several teachers now set it as the listening task in weeks two and three, at 0.9× speed, with instructions to write down five phrases the teacher used that you would not have thought of yourself.
When the online classes run
Each course meets twice a week at the same time on both evenings. Sessions are ninety minutes with a five-minute break in the middle, so a 19:00 class finishes at 20:30. The room opens fifteen minutes early for sound checks and stays open for ten minutes afterwards, which is where most of the good questions get asked.
| Evenings | Course | Level | Teacher | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tue & Thu 19:00 | Portuguese from Scratch (online) | A1.1 | Rui Amaral | European Portuguese with a weekly note on Brazilian usage. The first three sessions include ten minutes of pronunciation drilling, which works better online than in the building because everybody has headphones and can hear themselves properly for once. Popular with learners who already speak some Spanish and want a second door into the same room; say so at the placement chat, because those learners move quickly through the first month. |
| Tue & Thu 18:30 | German for Work (online) | A2–B1 | Ines Hartmann | The most-requested online course, largely because the people who need it are often the people whose employer has already moved them somewhere inconvenient. Telephone practice in weeks three, seven and ten is done as one-to-one calls inside the platform, which is closer to the real thing than a role play across a table. Bring a real workplace document to week six, redacted if it needs to be; the teacher has neutral substitutes if that is awkward. |
If you miss a session, watch the recording and read the summary sheet, and tell your teacher rather than hoping it will even out. You can move between an online group and the equivalent group in the building at the same level, subject to space, with no administration charge. We have learners in six countries, and your enrolment email states your class times in your own zone.
What actually happens in ninety minutes
The shape below is close enough that most online learners recognise it after the second week. We publish it because people put off enrolling simply because they cannot picture the evening, and a video class is harder to picture than a room.
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 18:15 | Room opens. Sound checks, and whoever is early chats to the teacher. |
| 18:30 | Everyone in, cameras on, five minutes of unstructured French about the week. No correction. |
| 18:38 | Review of Thursday's material as a quick pair game in breakout rooms. |
| 18:50 | New material in context: a short dialogue on the shared panel, read and dismantled. |
| 19:08 | Controlled practice, typed into the shared document together. |
| 19:15 | Five-minute break. Cameras off, kettle on, everyone reverts to English. |
| 19:20 | Free practice: a role play in threes, teacher dropping in on each room. |
| 19:45 | Back in the main room. Error clinic on the shared board, anonymous. |
| 19:56 | Homework set and explained. Two minutes, never more. |
| 20:00 | Room stays open ten minutes for anything you would rather ask privately. |
Note where the bandwidth goes: the twenty-five minutes of breakout work is lighter, because you are receiving two cameras rather than eight. The heaviest stretch is the error clinic, when everybody is back in gallery view with a shared document open on top of it.
Homework is the same twenty minutes a day we ask of the groups in the building, split across two shorter gaps instead of one long one. Submit it however you like — typed into the shared folder, or photographed on paper and emailed. If a task takes you more than about thirty minutes, stop and tell your teacher; either it was badly judged or you are in the wrong group, and both are our problem rather than yours.
Screen fatigue is real
We take it seriously, because most of our online learners have already spent several hours on video calls before ours starts. Hence ninety minutes rather than a hundred and five; hence the break at the halfway point with cameras off; hence the twenty-five minutes of breakout work in the second half, where you are looking at two faces instead of eight. It is a genuinely different kind of tiredness from sitting in a room, and it is why we do not run three-hour online sessions, however often we are asked to.
What an online course costs
One price per course, paid before the term starts. No membership fee, no registration fee, no platform charge and no charge for the placement or the connection check. Online courses have thirty contact hours against seventeen and a half in the building, which is why the fee is higher in total and lower per hour.
| Course type | Sessions | Contact hours | Fee | Per hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Online group course, standard | 20 × 90 min | 30 | £310 | £10.33 |
| Online group course, conversation or specialist | 20 × 90 min | 30 | £325 | £10.83 |
| Online group course, workplace focus | 20 × 90 min | 30 | £345 | £11.50 |
| Online pairs tuition, per person | 10 × 50 min | 8.3 | £275 | £33.13 |
| Online individual tuition, per hour | — | 1 | £48 | £48.00 |
| Lesson library access | — | — | Included | — |
| Connection check before term | 1 × 15 min | — | Free | — |
Reductions
- Second course in the same term: £30 off the lower-priced course, whether or not one is online and one in the building.
- Returning learner: £15 off if you studied with us in either of the two previous terms, applied automatically.
- Two people enrolling together: £15 off each.
- Full-time students and people on a low income: half-price places are held in every online beginners' group. Ask the office in confidence; no documents are required.
Reductions do not combine. We apply whichever gives you the larger discount.
Paying, and if it does not work out
Bank transfer or card, with no surcharge for either. Payment is due before the first session, and any fee over £200 can be split into three monthly instalments at no extra cost, with no credit check and no interest.
Refund terms match our in-person courses: a full refund up to seven days before the term starts, and up to the end of the second session a refund of the fee less £40. On top of that, and only for online groups, if the class is unusable from your end for connection reasons in the first two sessions and we cannot fix it together, we refund in full including the £40. That has happened four times in five years, and we would rather it happened than have somebody spend ten weeks watching a slideshow of their classmates.
Things people ask about the online groups
Is an online class as good as being in the room?
For most adults, almost. You lose a little: the corridor conversation before the lesson, the ease of catching a teacher's eye, and the particular energy of six people laughing at the same mistake at the same moment.
You gain the twenty minutes each way you were spending on a bus, twice as many sessions a week, and a recording of everything. Our own end-of-term scores are 4.6 for the building and 4.5 for online across the last four terms, which is close enough that we would not try to talk you out of either.
Do I really have to keep the camera on for ninety minutes?
Yes, as the ordinary state of the session. Nobody is policing it, and nobody minds if you step away for a moment, turn it off during the break, or blur your background because the kitchen is a disgrace.
But a group where cameras drift off stops being a class within about three weeks, so we ask for it clearly at enrolment rather than letting it become an awkward conversation in week five. If it is genuinely impossible for you, say so and we will point you at a better option.
Can I join from a phone, and do I need an account?
You can join from a phone, and we would rather you did than miss a session, but not as your normal arrangement: the gallery shows two or three people at a time, the shared handouts are unreadable, and holding a phone steady for ninety minutes is its own kind of misery. A seven-year-old laptop beats a new phone here, and a cheap tablet propped against a book beats both.
You do not need an account, a password or an app. You get a web address, you click it, you type the name you want to be called, and the teacher lets you in. This is also why we are relaxed about you joining from a work machine or a hotel.
Placement is the same for online groups as for the rest of the school: a free twenty-minute conversation with Sarah plus a short written section emailed as a PDF, bookable through the contact page. The first fortnight is a settling-in period, so you can still move to another group at the right level, online or in the building, at no cost.
Six places left across all online groups
Email or telephone the office, do a free placement chat if you need one, take the fifteen-minute connection check in the week before term, and turn up on the fifteenth of September with a cup of tea and your camera on.