New tool to help us understand gaps in our course portfolio

At FutureLearn, we’re always looking for ways to ensure we’re giving our learners what they want and promoting the great courses that our partners create within these in-demand areas. 

That’s why we're excited to introduce our new tool – Course Universe. 

Course Universe allows us to better understand our course portfolio. This tool works by feeding course description text into an AI large-language model which can transfer the text into numerical embeddings - these features capture the semantic meaning of the text. 

In assigning these numerical labels to our courses it becomes possible to group similar courses together, associate them with concepts such as our Topics and Categories, and identify patterns or gaps in the course space (see below scatter plot). This analysis allows us to see where we may need new courses or where existing ones might overlap, helping us design a more effective and balanced catalogue. 

With this data, a map can be generated with each course represented by a dot. Similar courses will sit closer together. While the map is a representation of the relationships between courses, the colours used illustrate the spread of Categories. This allows us to visually represent how courses and their Categories cluster together. It's a way of visually exploring how our courses are organised and related to each other.

We can also add other types of products to this map, allowing us to understand how our products —such as degrees, microcredentials, and short courses—are distributed. For example, we might find areas where we have many degrees but not enough shorter courses to support them. Or, we might see clusters of short courses where there’s a gap in related degree programs.

To determine gaps in our degree list we used numerical proximity of courses to degrees to identify areas without degrees and use the courses in that area to inform about what kind of degrees might fill this gap. 

This showed us that we currently have many more short courses in areas like cultural and historical studies and social sciences. 

What’s more, even in areas where degrees already exist, we were able to further drill down into the different topics and specialisms within a category. This application of searching our degrees and courses to make a gap list is an exciting opportunity for improving our curriculum and creating more cohesive learning paths for students.

If you’re interested in helping us fill these content gaps, particularly for online degrees, get in touch with your partnership manager today.