Welcome to your FutureLearn Product Update for December. 

1. Social prompts
2. Enrolment redesign
3. Length of free access
4. Looker Update: Amazon S3 Bucket

Social prompts have arrived!

 To make it easier to add a course to FutureLearn, we are introducing social prompts. Social prompts are powered by FutureLearn and placed automatically into your course. They are designed for active, engaging learning and build a peer-led cohort experience with your learners.

 We have recently concluded a pilot, testing out the process of adding these prompts into existing course runs. We chose runs with below average levels of social interaction, to see whether we could improve this. As a result, the % of social learners increased by over 60%, and learners also progressed further through their courses within the pilot time period.

 The social prompts have been designed from analysis of hundreds of courses and curated by our Learning Designers. They are spread throughout the course and aim to ask for reflection, promote engagement and encourage sharing tips between learners. Below is an example prompt in the experience.

If you prefer your own prompts, don’t worry, you will be able to opt out of having automated prompts in your course and continue to include your own within the course content.  

 To find out more about social prompts and how you can add them to you course, please visit this page.

Enrolment redesign

Our product team has been hard at work increasing the amount of learners paying for short courses on FutureLearn. When a learner joins a course, they will be presented with a new enrolment options page that clearly explains the differences between Unlimited, Upgrades and learning for free. 

 Length of free access

In the first week of January 2022, we’ll be rolling out a change to the free access period whereby learners will only be able to access a course for its planned duration.  If learners wish to have the additional benefit of accessing a course beyond its planned duration,, they will need to purchase an Unlimited subscription or an Upgrade.

Looker Update: Amazon S3 Bucket

To increase the flexibility of our data reporting platform, we have enabled the access to send data from Looker directly to an Amazon S3 bucket. This functionality works similar to email sends, where a user can set up a one off or regular scheduled data send, and select which cut of the data to forward. For more information on how to use Amazon S3 bucket sends, please see the Looker documentation.