We’re living in unprecedented times. Coronavirus continues to affect lives all over the world and its impact on the education sector has been keenly felt, with university campuses and schools worldwide having to shut their doors to staff and students alike.
At FutureLearn, our purpose is to transform access to education. Never has the need been so great to support HEI’s in transforming that access, as many students who would usually be sat in their classrooms find themselves dispersed, in different timezones, and possibly with little access to quality hardware or the internet. As just one of our responses to the ongoing pandemic, FutureLearn Campus – an initiative planned to launch in late 2020 – was rapidly released in early March to all of our existing university partners at no additional fee.
What is FutureLearn Campus?
FutureLearn Campus is able to support universities in a number of ways. Firstly, it enables HEI’s to open up any short courses that they have already created on the FutureLearn platform, for free, to their current students and staff – on any device and wherever in the world they are. FutureLearn, as a social learning platform, can support students with a connected social experience and is extremely effective at encouraging interactions between peers, educators and support staff.
These short courses can be delivered as open, enabling students to join a global community. What’s more, accessibility barriers are lowered as students and staff can sign in easily using their university account to join the short courses with free access to premium features.
Secondly, courses can be run to private cohorts, meaning universities can run courses through FutureLearn that only their students and staff can access, asynchronously and accessibly. The university partner can create new or adapt existing high-quality courses to be tailored to their own students’ needs.
Supporting universities moving to distance learning
We know one problem many universities are facing right now is integration. It’s important to note this offering is also compatible with universities’ own synchronous tools such as Zoom, Blackboard Collaborate, or Adobe Connect.
FutureLearn Campus also complements existing Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Management Systems, and enables the delivery of structured distance learning to students on any device wherever they are in the world.
Putting FutureLearn Campus to the test
The first partner to sign up to FutureLearn Campus was the University of Michigan, ranked 21st in the world and with 42,982 FTE students. The University of Leeds has also made a version of Campus available to their 40,000+ students and, through the private platform, launched their “Preparing to Learn Online at University” course via Campus. There is also a public version of the course available on the open FutureLearn platform. Several other partner universities in the UK, Europe, APAC, and the US are currently looking into how they can also give millions of their students and staff access to FutureLearn Campus.
What next? FutureLearn Campus 2.0
We are currently rapidly working on the launch of the next version of FutureLearn Campus. This will be a full FutureLearn.com discovery experience and include free access to every short course on the platform to all of our partner’s students and staff. This will mean that each partner’s courses are available to other universities within the partnership.
FutureLearn Campus is not just a short term solution for current challenges, but a valuable resource over the longer term that will allow universities worldwide to open up their virtual doors to today’s globalised, digitally-driven student base, while delivering lifelong learning opportunities to staff.
