Welcome to your FutureLearn Product Update for February. 

1. Social prompts enabled on new courses by default 
2. Improved comment visibility for learners
3. Introducing Rich Text Editor in Course Creator 

Social prompts enabled on new courses by default

The social prompts feature was introduced earlier this year to make it easier to add courses to the platform. To recap, social prompts are discussion points chosen from a provided list and spread throughout the course, just before the comments section of a step. They aim to ask learners for reflection, promote engagement and encourage sharing tips between each other.

Following up on our successful pilot, the last stage of our rollout process is to enable this feature on newly created courses by default. The planned release is on 17 February. This means that courses created after the release will have prompts automatically assigned to eligible steps (Article, Video, Audio step types, and not more frequently than once every four steps). 

It’s important to note that if you prefer to keep using your own prompts, you can disable this feature at any point. Also, if you need to change any of the prompts, you can edit them on the step itself. 

To find out more about this feature, please visit this page.

Improved comment visibility for learners 

The Learner Experience product team is currently working on improving the ‘Activity’ page within courses. The aim of these improvements is to make it easier for learners to engage, interact and re-engage in discussions throughout the course. They will be able to navigate between discussions on different weeks and steps by filtering, and also for example reply to and like comments in this aggregated course-level view. We hope to increase social interactions and engagement by driving learners to this page. 

We are planning to launch towards the end of February and will conduct an analysis on potential traffic changes to the page. Upon release, the ‘Activity’ tab will be renamed to ‘Conversations’.