Navigating your ExpertTrack
As you work through the courses in this ExpertTrack you’ll see opportunities to add comments at the end of most steps. There might be a question or problem to discuss, an opportunity to share an experience or link to an interesting web resource, or just a chance to check in with others taking the course. ExpertTracks are unfacilitated, so you won’t see the educators in the comments, instead it’s a space for you to work with other learners. The comments are a rich source of extra learning beyond the steps, so don’t forget to make the most of them.
FutureLearn features
If this is your first time using FutureLearn, take some time now to get familiar with the platform. If you’ve studied on FutureLearn before, you might find some useful features.
As you move through each course step, take some time to note important ideas to revise later for assessments. At the end of each step you will see a pink ‘mark as complete’ button, which you can press when you are ready to move to the next step.
At the top of each page you will see three tabs:
The tab to the right – ‘Progress’ – shows you what percentage of the course you have completed, and the results of any on-platform assessments.
The centre tab is ‘Activity’, where you can see who has been active most recently across the course. You can filter this activity by; all comments, comments you have bookmarked, your comments, and comments by learners you are following.
The left tab is ‘To Do’ which gives you a preview week by week of how the learning will be organised into activities and steps, as well as showing your progress through the steps and activities using colour coding.
Following other learners
If you see a learner comment that interests you, perhaps from someone who has a similar background or opinion, you can Follow them by clicking on the prompt next to the learner’s name. This will then allow you to view the comments of learners you are following across the course via the activity tab. You can also filter comments on each step by clicking on the Show: dropdown menu at the top of the comments and selecting Following.
Filtering and sorting step comments
Often on courses learners comment that there are so many comments that they feel overwhelmed or guilty for not reading everything, but don’t worry, we’ve developed a shortcut. You can filter step comments at the comments feed so that you can see only comments by learners you are following, or according to the most liked comments.
Liking, Replying, Bookmarking and Reporting
At the bottom of each learner comment you will see some options about how to interact with a comment. If you appreciate a comment, then Like it! Even better, if you have a comment you can Reply to the learner and start or add to a conversation. Bookmarking comments allows you to mark comments that you find particularly interesting and would like to come back to later.
Occasionally on courses, learners may write something that may be offensive or triggering to other learners. Each comment has a small flag icon with Report next to it. FutureLearn has a Code of Conduct which learners must follow. If you read a comment which contains something offensive to yourself or others on the course, simply click on the flag to report the comment with FutureLearn’s third party moderation team. You will see a drop down menu appears, where you can indicate the type of complaint and add extra information.
For more information learning on FutureLearn, we have a Crowdsourced Guide to Learning and 5 Useful Tips and Tools for Social Learning.
Which of the platform features do you think will be most useful to you? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and don’t forget to ‘like’ and reply to other learners.
