Find your Activity, Replies and Progress faster, with new in-course navigation

If you’re currently taking a FutureLearn course you may have noticed new in-course navigation, which enables you to easily jump to different features of the course. Here, our Product Manager, Tessa Cooper, explains how it works.

These great features have always existed, but they were hidden under the left-hand FutureLearn steps icon, so you might not have found and benefited from them. For instance, one learner told us:

“I completed a whole course before realising a lot of the useful features for navigation. Thankfully, when I started a second course, I was able to watch a short video clip about those, which was useful. So maybe make sure people know where to look for this.”

We’ve listened to your feedback and made the navigation more visible. This now means that, in addition to the “To do” list where you can find and access all of a course’s weeks and steps, you can now easily access the following elements of a course with one simple click:

Activity

The “Activity” page is a feed of all comments being made on a course. You might find it useful to quickly scan any interesting comments from educators and other learners who are on your course. If you click on a comment that you’re interested in, it takes you to the full conversation in the comments section of that step.

Replies

The “Replies” page is where you can see if anyone has responded to any of your comments within a course. This replies feed acts as a springboard back into the conversation, to help you catch up, rather than replicating the entire conversation. You can find out more about how replies work in this post.

Progress

Not only can you see at a glance which steps you have or haven’t completed on your “To do” list, you can also see how much of a course you’ve completed, including all of your test scores, on your “Progress” page.

In order to make sure this is up-to-date, don’t forget to hit “Mark as complete” every time you finish a course step. On this page, you’ll also see the option to purchase a Statement of Participation – an eye-catching printed certificate.

My courses

The final important change is that when you’re signed in, the left-hand FutureLearn steps icon will now always take you back to the “Your courses” page, where you can access all of the courses you’ve joined.

Here, you can also join new courses via the “Courses” link at the top or the “Browse more courses” button at the bottom. We’ll be developing this page further in the future, to give you more personalised course recommendations and updates.

We’ll be sharing more around how we researched, designed and built this new navigation with you soon.

If you have any feedback on the changes, please leave us a comment below. And for further advice on how to get the best out of FutureLearn, read more of our “Tips & Tricks.”