Product Update - May 2020

New Insights Portal  - understand your Course, Run and Overall Organisational performance 

• New dashboards are now available to team members with Organisation Admin permission via the Insights tab in Course Creator
• You can make use of advanced visualisations and data trends, benchmark your courses’ performance against platform-wide activity and make data informed decisions based on courses’ past performance
• You can share reports with colleagues via email and get alerts when a metric has changed
• Data in the dashboards is for all short courses that are not a Degree Pathways course and are not a part of a Degree or a Microcredential. 
• More information about the Insights Dashboard here

A new way to find your courses in Course Creator

With an increased number of courses now available on the platform, we’ve launched a new way of searching for courses that is designed to be quicker and easier to use so that you can save time searching and instead have more time to manage your content. For more information about these changes, please see this page. 

Learning Manager is now entirely run-based

• All of the pages in the Courses section of Learning Manager are now run-based, like they are in the program section.
• This change was made to solve the problem of the Courses page listing enrolments for every run of each course together, making it hard to see which enrolments were for runs finished a long time ago.
• All course invitations are run-based (currently, invitations to unlisted and invite-only courses are tied to a specific run, but not those to listed, open courses). The main reasons for doing this are to be consistent with the new run-based course pages, simplifying the platform and reducing confusion.

Improvements to showcasing and administering microcredentials

We’ve made a number of improvements to how you can showcase your microcredential and to make learner enrolment smoother. These include the below:

• You can now add up to three additional partner logos to show on a microcredential description page. Pick from: Co-creator, Endorser, Accreditor, Certifier, Validator and ‘In partnership with’.

• To boost enrolments close to your microcredential start date, a big, bold urgency banner appears automatically on the microcredential description page when the enrolment deadline or start date is within 2 weeks.

• We’ve made several sections of the learner enrolment journey optional - you can choose to remove these to make the journey quicker for learners. These are:
• Phone number, Previously studied at this university, and Marketing opt-in fields on the Details page
• ID verification step

We’ve also made improvements to how you can view and administer microcredentials via Learning Manager:

You can enrol on your microcredential without paying, so that you can see what it looks like to learners without having to go through the enrolment journey. 

• FutureLearn assigns a randomly generated external ID for every learner when they enrol onto a microcredential. If you wish, you can replace this ID with an ID that makes more sense to you (ie the university student ID), by updating a spreadsheet and uploading it to Learning Manager.

• Once the microcredential is complete and final results have been decided, you can upload results to FutureLearn in a pass, fail or deferred format via Learning Manager. This generates a notification of results to learners with more information, and a celebratory achievement page for learners who pass. Talk to your Partnership Manager for a demo of how this will work.

Making it easier to add and update pages on www.futurelearn.com 

• This quarter we moved content from about.futurelearn.com to www.futurelearn.com including our blog, press releases as well as FAQ’s
• The main reason behind this move is to help increase our rankings in Google which in turn helps to improve the amount of organic traffic to our website. 
• This also helps any future link building campaigns to be more effective as any gains in search rankings will now be linked to our main site rather than to a blog on a separate domain.

New course syllabus 

• Course description pages can now feature a more detailed syllabus which is populated using course content.
• Where learners used to see a simple list of topics, under ‘What will you learn?’ if the syllabus module is switched on in course creator  learners will instead see a week by week breakdown, with a drop down that enables them to see the content activity by activity:

• The new syllabus provides learners with more detail about what they can expect to be covered within each week of a course. We think this will give them more confidence that the course will meet their needs and encourage learners to join the course.
• The new syllabus can be enabled on any open course or microcredential description page. It is reliant on the content being present in course creator, and being ready to publish - the Week titles and Activity images, titles and descriptions are pulled from the course content. For more information about course description pages see here. 
• If you'd like to enable the syllabus for any specific courses, please contact partnersupport@futurelearn.com.