Introducing the platform

How this all works

Each week will have a theme, and we’ll learn about it through videos, articles and discussion. There will also be other optional tasks and exercises you can try to enhance your learning.

Each week builds on the last, so we strongly recommend you work through each week in order. All of the course content is now available to you, so if you need to, you can work ahead – but as social learning is an important part of the course it would be best if we tried to work through it together! Each week should take you around 4 hours to complete, if you do all the tasks, and there is a quiz or test within each week to give an indication of what you’ve learnt.

Using FutureLearn

If this is your first FutureLearn course, you may find it useful to read the ‘how it works’ guide. We also recommend reading five tips and tools for social learning on FutureLearn to get the most out of the interactive and social learning features of this course.

Engage on social media

We have a hashtag – #FLCrimePunishment – which you are more than welcome to use on social media to talk about the course and to find others who are talking about it too!

Meet the course team

This course was originally devised and developed by a former colleague at the York Law School, Ben Fitzpatrick, who you will see in many of the ‘talking head’ videos.

My name is Charlie Tye, and I will be the lead educator as the course unfurls – across the weeks, we’ll also be hearing the opinions from a variety of experts from the York Law School.

To get the most out of the course, I would strongly suggest that you follow me to have easy access to my comments and contributions. You can also follow other learners to quickly see their comments and contributions to the discussion. To do this click the ‘Follow’ button next to their name (on their profile page).

Discussions

On the FutureLearn platform, engaging in discussions and commenting on course materials is an essential part of the learning experience. When contributing, it’s important that you follow the FutureLearn code of conduct and are respectful of your fellow learners.

If you have already begun to contribute, other learners may have replied to you. You can ‘like’ comments if you agree with what’s been said or if you have found something particularly interesting.

You can also click to filter the comments on a step to only see:

• comments by people you are following
• the most-liked comments
• your own comments

Let’s get started

This week we’ll be looking at what we define as ‘crime’ and meeting some of the key members of the team. So, let’s get started!

(And when you have finished reading a section, please ‘Mark as complete’, and move onto the next step).