Reviews and ratings are presented on Course Description Pages and course cards for all open short courses including degree tasters. This does not include invite-only courses, or short courses locked behind the paywall of a Microcredential or degrees.  

Reviews are a signal of credibility, demonstrating that other people have trusted FutureLearn and enjoyed the course. 

Learners receive an automatic email asking for a rating and a review when they have marked 90% of steps complete on a short course. 

• Five reviews are required before they feature on the Course Description Page. 
• A new course must be live for 10 weeks before reviews will be published. This is the period of time when a course is labeled as ‘new’. 
• Reviews appear on courses, not runs. They will carry over to new runs. Reviews will continue to be displayed, with no cut-off period. They are dated so it is clear when the review was made. 

Yotpo review moderation 

Yotpo is the third-party review platform we use to send email requests for reviews and to present the reviews on the platform via widgets.  

Yotpo’s in-house moderation team checks all reviews using guidelines based on the Code of Conduct for Reviews that learners are directed to. 

Moderators will then do one of the following:

• approve and publish the review on the Course Description Page once a course has five or more reviews. 
• escalate the review to the FutureLearn Community Team for a private or public response.
• reject the review. 

Use reviews in your own marketing

If you wish to use your course reviews in your own marketing: 

• exercise discretion. Avoid reviews that contain sensitive or personal data or sensitive comments about a person’s physical or mental health, disability, or religious beliefs
• always anonymise the learner review, removing their name and other personal data in all cases.
• let your Partnership Manager know.

Responding to reviews 

• Our community team will respond to reviews (in public or in private) if a response is necessary or helpful. 
• If the team needs support with a response they will get in touch with you via your Partnership Manager. 
• If partners see a review that they want to respond to they can contact their FL Partnership Manager, who will contact the community team.
• The Community team may decide to hold reviews back from publishing until they have a response if it’s important to provide context.
• Partners should contact their Partnership Manager if they think a review is in breach of our Code of Conduct for Reviews, and the Partnership Manager will liaise with the Community Team. 
• If it does not breach our Reviews Code of Conduct is fair we will post the review and leave it live.

Learner surveys 

FutureLearn sends four types of survey to learners to gather insights into learner demographics, motivations, satisfaction, and course impact. These surveys are sent before, during and after the course, asking a smaller set of questions each time. 

The four surveys are: 

1. more about you -  sent when a learner registers with FutureLearn
2. archetypes - sent when a learner  joins a course 
3. weekly sentiment - sent while learning on the course (also reaches learners who do not complete the course)
4. post-course survey sent when a learner finishes a course.  

Learners are also asked survey questions that are integrated into the learning experience on futurelearn.com. 

Surveys are not available on invite-only (private) courses, or runs that are part of degree programs.

Download our survey questions PDF to read the exact questions included in each survey.  

If you wish to conduct your own research during a course please read: create and send a research survey to learners. 

Access survey data

Stats dashboard 

Survey results are automatically available through the stats dashboard

Post-course survey responses

Available on the stats dashboard under the ‘End of course survey results’ tab provides a visual. The full data set is available as the Post Course Survey Data and Free Text .csv files (see screenshot above).

Weekly sentiment survey results 

Available on the Facilitation Dashboard is the distribution of learners’ satisfaction with the given week. Free text answers are downloadable from the stats dashboard.

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

Contact FutureLearn