Contents
Welcome to our New Partners!
We know you are keen to get started. Below are the first tasks all new partners are asked to complete.
Organisation profile
To build courses with FutureLearn you first need an organisation profile.
All your courses will sit within your dedicated organisation profile. No one from any other organisation can access them.
Within the organisation profile sits a partner page which is made public when your first course is published. It is a page within the FutureLearn site explaining that you are one of our partners and some key information about you. You will also feature on our current partners page.
To create your organisation profile we require:
- your organisation logo as a vector file (usually Adobe Illustrator, PostScript, or SVG, with the file extension .ai, .eps, or .svg)
- an image to represent your organisation (at least 648 x 280 pixels as .JPG or .PNG file). This image should not have a logo or watermark overlaid on it as these may be cropped when viewing on certain devices
- a short description of your organisation, written in the third person. Between 150 and 200 characters including spaces. This will appear on Course Description Pages once you have courses live
- a long description of your organisation, written in the third person. Between 150 and 500 characters including spaces. This will appear on your partner page.
- a URL linking to your organisation homepage
- the email address of the team member you would like to be your Certificate Contact (the point of contact for any queries regarding course certificates and signatures)
- the date your institution was established, it’s location and ranking (Higher Education Institutions only)
- the name and email address of the member(s) of staff who will be given the highest level of access to your organisation profile: organisation admin permission. This permission level provides full admin rights to all of your courses on FutureLearn. Organisation Admins can give permissions to other team members on a course-by-course basis.
We ask for the logo in a vector format so that the image can be resized across a variety of applications on our site without loss of quality (bitmap images such as JPEG, PNG, BMP can appear pixelated if they need to be enlarged beyond their original size).
Please do not create your EPS, SVG, etc file by converting or exporting a bitmap file. The resulting file will not be a 'true' vector file, and cannot be used on the FutureLearn site. Where possible, please create your vector logo file from an original vector file format. This will retain the scalability and quality we need.
Send these assets to courses@futurelearn.com as soon as possible (copying in your Partnership Manager). Our Media Specialists will need to format your images and this can take around a week.
Next steps
New partners will hear from their Partnership Manager and also the Content Team in the early stages. The Content team will provide you with a survey to complete, to determine your comfort and experience with online course design. Based on the answers you provide you will receive links to resources and web pages to answer questions you may have.
How to Create a Great FutureLearn Course
Social learning is the DNA of FutureLearn courses. This can be an unknown approach for new partners. We have created a free 4-week private course specifically for partners to learn about our approach, experience a course on the FutureLearn platform and consider course design.
Your Partnership Manager can provide you with the link to the course (you will also receive it, with specific step recommendations when you complete the survey above). To invite colleagues to the course please contact: courses@futurelearn.com.
Explore the partners site
While you wait for your organisation profile to be set up, take a look through the pages of this partners site. Start with the PLAN pages, then DESIGN, BUILD, RUN then REVIEW. The sections are organised into the five stages of course development. Familiarising yourself with the course proposal page may be helpful initially.
Play around in a sandbox
Once your organisation profile is set up, we can create a sandbox course for your team. This is a course shell in Course Creator that is private. It is not possible to launch the course to the public. It provides partners the opportunity to play around with the features of Course Creator, adding weeks, activities and steps, formatting text, etc.
Staff members with organisation admin permission can provide author permission to colleagues who wish to access the sandbox course.
3PLay
The staff member who is provided with organisation admin permission will also receive login details for 3Play. You can choose to use 3Play to develop subtitles and transcripts for any courses you create which feature video. Use of 3Play will involve an additional charge but FutureLearn has a subscription providing discounts to partners. Subtitles or transcripts are essential within our Quality Assurance criteria.
Enrol on a FutureLearn course
Finally, another great way to familiarise yourself with the platform and what is possible is to enrol and complete FutureLearn courses yourself.
The majority are available for free and require a low-time commitment.
Marketing playbook
As one of our valued partners, you automatically receive our best-in-class platform marketing which is outlined in our Marketing Playbook.
Announcing a new partner has joined
Follow us on social media and @ mention us when you join FutureLearn as a partner. We will amplify and celebrate you as a new partner. FutureLearn has a presence on each of the following channels:
We also announce all new partners via a quarterly press release. New partners will be included in the press release once their content is live on the FutureLearn platform.
Example partner images
Partner image, features at the top of the partner page:
Please note that throughout the FutureLearn platform on mobile devices, images will be positioned to the full width of the screen, but cropped similarly to desktop and tablet.
Partner image dimensions:
Video about FutureLearn
Find out more about who we are, who we work with and what we can offer our Partners.
Terminology on this page that you aren’t familiar with? Check out our glossary.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.