Introducing new open, shareable steps in FutureLearn courses

We’ve recently made some of the steps within FutureLearn courses open, so that you don’t need to sign in to the site to see or share them. Here, our Product Manager, Simon Pearson, explains how it works.

As you’re moving through your courses, you might from time to time notice a little set of share icons appear at the bottom of the page like so:

You can use these to share interesting material from your courses with your friends, peers and loved ones, to:

• show them something relevant to their interests;
• show off what you’ve learned;
• distract them from cat pictures;
• or all of the above.

Anyone can see what you share

The best part is that the person you’ve shared the material with doesn’t have to have a FutureLearn account or sign in to see it. It’s just like sharing a video from YouTube or an article from Wikipedia – anyone can see what you share.

Here are a few examples of these new open, shareable steps, which have proved popular so far:

• What can I do to improve my speaking? Some great tips for improving your pronunciation from the British Council’s “Understanding IELTS” course.
• Anatomy of the circulatory system. Find out why our cardiovascular system is a bit like a central heating system with this video from the University of Reading’s “Heart Health.”
• Mobile phones and wearable technology. What does your mobile phone know about you? This film from the University of Warwick’s “Big Data” course explains all.
• What does it feel like to have a learning disability? A real eye-opener from Lancaster University’s “Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching.”

Why are we doing this?

We’ve begun opening up large swathes of our courses to be shared far and wide, as our Head of Product, Matt Walton, said we would in his blog post celebrating our first birthday:

“We think that allowing as many people to find, enjoy and share parts of our courses is the best way to spread the word, enabling people to get a taste of what’s on offer and encouraging them to sign up to our courses. This will also allow us to make available thousands of pages of educational resources for people to use and link to. And we’ll be working on ways to enable learners to share their achievements with others.”

We believe passionately in sharing knowledge and learning with others, so we’ll be opening up more and more steps for you to see and share.

For more on our approach to social learning, check out some tips on how to get the most out of FutureLearn from our Social Lead, David Thair.