Course Creator: Course Summary page revamp

To improve the content creator experience by simplifying the navigation within Course Creator, we have revamped the course summary page. This will allow partners to see the key steps needed to create a course. The steps are broken into three sections that represent the distinct sets of activities a partner has to complete to put a course live - firstly setting up their course, then adding the content, and finally setting up the emails.

Setting up your course - For this stage, it clearly shows which fields are required and which are optional. This makes it easier to see what is required in order to prepare your course to open for enrolment.

In the Building your course and Creating course emails steps, users have one easy to use link to jump into building courses and to be able to create, view or edit emails that are sent to learners.

Upon releasing this feature, we also added a method of gathering feedback, which will allow us to better monitor the impact of updating the layout of the page.

Coming Soon! Left Hand Navigation in Course Creator

The Content Creation team will be introducing the concept of a permanent left-hand, side navigation to the course content area of Course Creator. It will allow users to easily navigate through weeks, activities and steps, in one consistent location. Rather than the current method of having to drill down through a week and activity to view a single step, then having to come all the way back up and down again to view a different step.

The goal is to reduce the number of clicks while navigating between content, leading to a reduced time to create courses and less frustration for users.

Learner Experience: Left Hand and Sticky navigation for steps

The Learner Experience team have made some improvements to the in-course experience, with the aim of making it easier for learners to navigate around the course content. We have implemented a new left hand navigation to allow learners to orientate themselves within the course, and to easily navigate between steps. There is also a sticky navigation bar at the bottom, which will remain visible at all times. This contains the next and previous step buttons and Mark as Complete.

The designs were tested with learners and were found to be well liked, and during the rollout process we have seen a marked increase in step visits. We will be continuing to make minor improvements to this layout to ensure that we make the most of these changes to the learner journey.

Looker Updates

1. Email send permissions

Having completed our security review, the FutureLearn Data Team will be opening up access to allow partners to send dashboard content via email. For security reasons, the user will only be able to send content to their own email address, which they can then forward on separately if need be. This change applies to all available dashboard content on Looker. Please see below for before (left) and after (right) screenshots, of where to find email send functionality in the top right hand corner of dashboard pages.

Users can now also select the previously greyed out “Schedule delivery” function, to set up an email send. Emails can be sent out once, or at a recurring date. Please see screenshot below for a view of the Schedule Delivery functionality. How to use this functionality is also detailed in the User Guide deck on the Looker information page on Partner Site.

2. Update to ExpertTrack subscription country attribution

At the time of building the ExpertTrack dashboards, FutureLearn were not able to capture accurate IP address information from the learner at the time of their subscription start. Instead, we used the learners IP address at the time of their last enrolment or purchase. Now that we have accurate IP address information at the time of the learners subscription start, we will be switching over the country attribution to this method. This will provide more accurate information on the learners country, especially for those that were potentially missing due to not having a previous enrolment or purchase. However this will cause a small change in country attribution for the free trial starts currently attributed across the ExpertTrack dashboards.

3. New “Is Course Listed on FL Site” filter added to Short Course Dashboards

A new filter has been added to the Short Course Dashboards which allows users to filter on courses which are listed, i.e. discoverable by search or collection pages, on the FutureLearn website or not. This is to allow partners which host unlisted private courses to view data on their course content. This filter defaults to only showing listed courses, which means that users will not see any changes to the default data loaded in the dashboard. The data shown in the dashboards will only change when a user selects a new option for the listed course filter. Please see screenshot below for an example of this filter, on the Partner Summary dashboard.

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Product Update - September 2021