See who’s followed you, or liked or replied to your comments, with new on-site notifications

Our Social Lead, David Thair, introduces new on-site notifications, which make it easier to see who’s followed you on FutureLearn, or liked or replied to your comments.

If you’re a FutureLearner, we hope you’d agree that learning through conversation is an important part of what makes learning with FutureLearn so special. We’re constantly making small improvements to your learning experience, but sometimes we make bigger changes that we’d like to tell you about. Like today.

Introducing on-site notifications

From now on, you will be notified within FutureLearn when another learner interacts with you or your comments in some way. The notification looks like this:

Clicking or tapping on the ‘badge’ will take you to your brand new notifications page. The notifications page works across all courses, so if you’re taking part in more than one course, you’ll find all your notifications in one place.

Here’s what you’ll find on your notifications page:

See who likes your comments

If someone likes one of your comments, you will now be notified and be shown who liked it. Only you will be able to see who liked your comment.

See when you have a new reply

With the new notifications, you will know as soon as there has been a response to a comment you have posted, making it much easier to keep a good conversation going.

See when you have a new follower

Following learners and educators makes it easier to see their comments, by using the “following” filter in a Step or in the Activity Feed for a course. If someone follows you, it means they find your comments interesting! Find out more in our previous post: “Six tips and tools for social learning on FutureLearn“.

Notifications help

Why haven’t I received any notifications yet?

You will only get notifications for activity that happens from today onwards. You will not be able to see who liked your comments or replied to you before today here – though you can still find your old conversations in the “replies” tab of a course. If you haven’t had any notifications yet, you should try posting some more comments and interacting with other learners!

How do I get back to my notifications page?

You can view your notifications page at any time by clicking on your profile icon at the top-right of any page:

Will I get lots of email notifications?

No. We will not send you any extra emails as a result of this new page. You will continue to receive reply notification emails (no more than one per day for a course) and new follower notifications – you might like to review your email settings on your settings page.

How do I turn off notifications?

If you would like to turn off the pink ‘badge’ that indicates when you have a new notification, you can do it from your settings page by un-ticking this box:

You will still be able to access your list of recent notifications. If you would like to turn the pink notification ‘badge’ back on, simply tick the box on your settings page.

We hope these notifications will help you to better feel the impact your fantastic contributions are making to the courses you take part in. This is only the first step for notifications and we will continue to make improvements as we see how it used. If you have any feedback about it, please get in touch with us: feedback@futurelearn.com.

For more advice on how to use FutureLearn and the new features we introduced, read more of our “Tips & Tricks” posts.

This post was updated on 07/03/2016 to include the instructions about how to turn off notifications.