We've made some changes to FutureLearn in the last few months – here's a rundown of what's new.

Launch of FutureLearn Campus 

• FutureLearn Campus provides staff and students at your organisation with free upgrades on certain short courses until the end of September 2020.
• This product offers a self-service, subscription experience where students from universities have the opportunity to supplement their learning during a time where campus learning has been unavailable to them. 
• To learn more about FutureLearn Campus read this article which explains how it works and what’s included. 
• We’re looking to make FutureLearn Campus a permanent product offer with some updates. If you’re interested to know more, please talk to your partnership manager. 

Publish microcredential results to learners on FutureLearn

• You can upload and publish final microcredential results to learners via Learning Manager, prompting learners to receive an email notification with their result.
• Learners who pass the microcredential will also receive an achievement page on FutureLearn with more information on what they achieved and a way to describe their new skills to employers. 
• Additionally, successful learners will receive a digital Statement of Completion from FutureLearn, allowing them to prove their learning if they haven’t yet received an official transcript or certificate.

Choose to display scores to learners on LTI-enabled exercise steps

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• You can choose whether FutureLearn should receive and store scores from your LTI-enabled exercise steps. Let your Partnership Manager know if you’d like to enable this.
• If this is enabled, percentage score will display to learners on the exercise step once available.

 Learner reviews and ratings 

• FutureLearn has implemented learner reviews and ratings on short courses so that prospective learners can see what other learners thought of a course before they join, encouraging them to join.
• You can see the reviews and ratings on course description pages for your courses, and star ratings appear on course cards across the site.
• Learners who mark 90% of course steps complete are invited to leave a review so you know that reviews are only from genuine learners.
• See this article  for answers to frequently asked questions on ratings and reviews.

Improvements to Open and Highlight Steps 

We’re making improvements to Open and Highlight Steps to capture more organic traffic from search engines and better direct learners to course description pages.

FutureLearn currently has approximately 20,000 Open Steps which are publicly accessible to potential learners via Google and other search engines. We’re currently completing a piece of work so that our marketing team can optimise and improve these steps moving forward. 

These improvements will include:

• Closing open steps that are “Welcome to FutureLearn” steps. These are open as a consequence of the default visibility setting being “open” but should be closed because they can be potentially confusing to learners who have stumbled across them in search engines
• Combining together the content of some open steps of the same course to make thicker and more compelling content
• Changing some open steps into a Highlight step so that it is promoted on a course description page so that they rank higher in search engines and more learners can find this content whilst browsing our courses
• Adding snippets of relevant content to open steps to improve the relevancy of the page to prospective learners and improve the rankings in search engines.

Please note that none of these changes will have any impact on the in-course experience.

Improvements to our Homepage

• We’ve introduced a new “register” button to the header on the Homepage and to the site navigation to boost learner registrations 
• The modules displaying our partnership and the value proposition are now higher up the page to boost trust and credibility

Blog Revamp and Content Volume Boost

• We’ve revamped the FutureLearn blog and significantly boosted our content creation activities. We’ve done this to attract an even higher volume of site visitors, expand our share of search engine traffic and effectively lead users to course pages via this medium
• Increased blog activity has been a great success over the last quarter in bringing new site users and enrolments