Student Help & Support

We aim to answer questions and issue exam papers within 24 hours. In practice, it’s usually much sooner than this, sometimes within minutes or an hour or two. We normally mark exams within 2-3 working days.

So if you haven’t heard back from us within the times given above, the first thing to do is to check your junk email. If you can’t find anything there, please contact instructor@skippersonline.net to check that we received your question, exam request or exam submission.

Regarding junk email, we are aware that students with BT Internet or Yahoo email addresses are particularly vulnerable to having our emails filtered out. This is an ongoing problem with BT and we are not the only business to suffer. Ideally, we would recommend that you switch to another email provider, perhaps Gmail?

See our separate exam guidance page

If you are in the United Kingdom and have a normal residential postal address we will have sent your Student Pack Royal Mail First-Class, which is normally pretty reliable. We will have notified you when we posted it and if it hasn’t arrived within five days, please let us know.

If you’re in United Kingdom and gave us the business address or shared address we will have sent your Student Pack Royal Mail First-Class Signed-For and will have sent you tracking details, so please follow the instructions we gave you to see where your package are is.

If you are overseas and didn’t request courier delivery we will have sent your Student Pack either “tracked and signed-for” or “signed-for”, depending upon what services are available in your country. We will have sent you tracking details, so please follow the instructions we gave you to see where your package is. Delivery times vary, depending upon where you are, and sometimes packages get held up in customs. We are afraid this delay can be somewhat unpredictable but would hope that all packages arrive within an absolute maximum of 14 days. If after then, you still don’t have it, please contact us to discuss the next move.

If you requested courier delivery, please follow the instructions we gave you to track your consignment.

You can order a chart protractor and dividers from Amazon here.

Our lessons cover everything you need to know, not only to pass your exams but to prepare you for your practical course or exam.

If you’d like to broaden your theory knowledge even further have a look at our recommended further reading page

This occasionally happens if your Internet connection suffers a temporary interruption or slowdown. It should correct itself however because all Internet browsers cache data to improve performance, it’s necessary to do a hard refresh on your browser’s cache. Control/F5 on Windows. Command/F5 on a Mac.

All lessons include audio narration  - exercises and exercise answers don’t.

If you can’t hear the soundtrack to a lesson, try another. If both lessons are silent, try some other content on your device, for example watching a video on YouTube. If you can’t hear that either, it suggests that your speakers might be turned right down or there’s a problem your soundcard.

If you can hear one lesson but not another, try doing a hard refresh on your browser. Control/F5 on Windows. Command/F5 on a Mac. 

If you can’t hear the sound on any lessons but can when watching a movie on YouTube or something similar, please contact us and tell us what sort of device you are using, which operating system version and which browser.

The first thing to try is logging out and back in again, then a hard refresh on your browser. Control/F5 on Windows, Command/F5 on a Mac. 

If this doesn’t work, please check that JavaScript and cookies are enabled within your browser. See here for more information on JavaScript and here for cookies.

If nothing seems to help, please tell us what sort of device you are using, which operating system version and which browser.

Whenever you save or submit an exercise you will be sent an email containing a link which you can click on to reopen the exercise to add to or amend your answers.

Please note that every time you start an exercise from within the Learning Managment System it creates a new instance of the exercise so you won’t see your previously entered answers.