Maintaining course quality is imperative. Quality Assurance review is contractual for all open courses on the FutureLearn platform (except private courses and non-English language courses). QA takes place four weeks before a course start date. 

Course criteria 

Partners are expected to carry out their own QA checks. We expect you to review all course content to ensure it meets our course criteria. Our Course Criteria are a set of best practice statements grouped into themes: 

1. Social Learning 
2. Learner Journey 
3. Content Suitability 
4. External Content 
5. Assessment 
6. Accessibility 
7. Legal considerations 

QA process 

We will keep in contact with you in the lead up to QA, to make you aware of the workload and the criteria you'll use in your review. We appreciate as much notice as possible if your course will not be ready for QA on the date planned.

QA takes place four weeks before a course start date. All course content must be complete and in Course Creator for QA.

Depending on the length of the course, we recommend you dedicate one or two weeks to your review. The criteria for the review are provided in a dedicated QA form. You can access an an offline version of our QA form to prepare you for your internal reviews (see below), but your final QA self-certification must be submitted via an online form that we provide. 

Download a copy of our Course Outline/QA document with Course Criteria 

If you require a PDF version of the Course Criteria, please email courses@futurelearn.com.

Two ways to avoid last minute QA changes 

1. Submit your course outline and sample content to our Learning Designer and Media Specialist before you build your course. It's easier to act upon feedback before you have to amend it.  
2. Explore our guidance about how to build course content which meets the QA criteria within each theme (see menu to the left for links to the themes' dedicated pages)  

Top tips 

1. If you need to open your course for enrolment wait until after QA. 
2. Provide reviewer permission to trusted colleagues and ask them to proofread the content. Spelling mistakes and grammar errors distract learners.  
3. Complete your course certificates during your course build and before QA. They often get left until the last minute, but we cannot publish a course without them. Refer to the 5 Stages of Course Development List of Links for all the additional tasks required during your course build. 
4. This includes inserting your learning outcomes into Course Creator. These do not pull through from your course proposal. They need to be manually added to appear on the Course Description Page and certificate transcripts.  

Re-runs 

QA is only required for a new run of an existing course if significant changes are made. See our re-run pages for more information. 

Learn more in step Most common QA issues and how to avoid them in Week 4 of How to Create a Great FutureLearn Course. Ask your Partnership Manager for access.  

Terminology on this page that you aren’t familiar with? Check out our glossary. 

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