Home / Teaching / Inclusive Teaching / Teaching English: How to Plan a Great Lesson / Seven tips for your FutureLearn Course
Seven tips for your FutureLearn Course
Watch some of the British Council educators talking about how you can get the most out of your course.
Hello, I’m Claire, and I’m part of the British Council team on the FutureLearn courses. And in this video, we’re going to share some of our tips to help you make the most out of your course. On your FutureLearn course you’ll have the chance to comment on almost every step, so please do comment. Don’t be shy. Don’t worry about your English or are your ideas good enough. Just jump in get involved and you’ll soon feel part of the course.
My top tip is to get involved with conversations. FutureLearn works best when people work together, and reply to each other, and build up conversations. So don’t just add your own comments, read other people’s comments too. Find comments that you like, that you agree with, and that you disagree with and reply to them. You never know, you might get a reply back from somebody who lives on the other side of the world. So join in the conversations. Have fun.
Hello, I’m Sally. My tip is to follow interesting people. And by interesting I mean people that are interesting for you. So if you see a comment that grabs your attention you can like the comment and you can also follow the person who wrote that comment and then you’ll always be able to find their other comments. Also follow any educators that are on your course and that means that you’ll be able to find their comments easily to. OK, enjoy your course.
Hi, you’ve heard some great advice so far on how to get the most out of the course and I’m here to share a little more. One of the most important things in the course is the comments. They’re really the heart and soul of the whole experience. It’s where you read other people’s ideas, suggestions, and conversations and it’s where you join in and share your ideas and get to meet lots of other people. So it’s really important that you make the most of this opportunity. Sometimes you can look at it and think there’s just so many comments, where do I begin? But there are tools to help you on the page and you should make use of them.
We’ve mentioned following people and you can actually organise the comments so that you only see the people you follow. So if you’ve joined in a good conversation before or found someone that you really enjoyed chatting with, then you can automatically find if they’ve made a comment on that step and that can really help you. Another possibility is to organise them by the most liked comments. Very often a few conversations on each step really take off and become very active and you’ll find that they then get lots of likes and lots of people join in and the conversation gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and that’s fantastic.
So you can also choose to order the comments on the page by that and that will help you to find the most active and the most involved conversations. And of course, start your own conversations whenever you’re ready. Make sure to comment as much as you can. Don’t worry about anything about language or anything else. Everyone wants to know what you’re thinking and what your ideas are so just make sure that you join them as much as you can.
Watch out for events. Join us and other British Council experts on our live broadcasts. These give you the chance to ask us questions and we’ll do our best to answer those questions. They are free and they’re open to people from all around the world. You can join as many as you want. But equally, if you can’t make it, no problem. Don’t worry. It’s just an optional activity. So look out for pages called live events or community events.
Hi, everyone. I’m Sirin and my top tip is keep checking the course. New things appear during the course as we update steps with live events or community events, or other learners add information or images on the shared online spaces like Padlet. So try to keep checking in on the course. And check your email too as we’ll send you updates.
Hi, everyone, I’m Tina. You’ve just heard some fantastic advice from everyone else. So there’s all that’s left for me to say is just to make sure you make this course yours. Do it how you want. You can read all the text, watch all the videos. You can jump ahead to week two, week three. Find the bits that you’ll enjoy and make it yours. And also, one other thing, don’t forget to enjoy it.
Watch some of the British Council educators from our MOOC teams talking about how you can get the most out of your course.
In the video, Sally said you should follow the educators so you can always find their comments easily. Click on the links below to see the profiles of your educators for this course.
Meet the team
We have a global team of educators waiting to answer your questions and join your conversations. The educators for your course are:
Claire Ross (Lebanon) Lead Educator
Suzanne Mordue (UK)
Josh Underwood (Spain)
Remember to click on the links to their profiles and follow them.
We hope this video helps you get to know how this course will work but if you have any questions about how to use this course, ask us in the comments below.
This article is from the online course:
Teaching English: How to Plan a Great Lesson
Created by
This article is from the free online
Teaching English: How to Plan a Great Lesson
Reach your personal and professional goals
Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.
Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.
