My semester on FutureLearn

People hold large puzzle pieces putting a puzzle together

It's the end of the year, and the end of the term, so I look back at my own learning this past fall semester. This fall, I decided to revisit FutureLearn.  Over the past few years (since 2018ish?) I've been signing up for FutureLearn courses so that I can have them in my queue (in case they disappear). I guess I was optimistic in 2019...and 2020...and 2021 that I would get to these, so the queue of courses kept getting larger and larger 🤣. So, with the queue so long I decided to do something about it:

The total number of courses I went through this fall (August through December was 36.  Some courses were outside of my wheelhouse but seemed interesting, while others are peripheral to what I am doing, so things were not always new.   Unsurprisingly, the courses that were on subject matters that I already knew something about went by rather fast since past information kept coming up, both my own previous knowledge and things that came up in previous FutureLearn courses. Being able to binge courses in this manner really highlighted the duplication of information across related courses on the platform (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).  The courses where I didn't have any background in went a little slower, but they were quite interesting nevertheless.  The one that stands out to me is the Business of Film.  I don't know when I'm going to use this information in my life, but it was interesting to learn more about how this industry works.

One of the interesting things that I observed is that instead of having courses retracted from the platform (as seems to be the case with coursera, for example), in FutureLearn, if you're enrolled in a course that is no longer maintained you get a warning of when the last update was, and that information in the course may no longer be accurate.  I prefer this approach to simply booting users who registered for it.

In terms of pacing, I was able to get through two or three short courses per week (short = 2-3 modules), or 1 longer course per week (long =  6-10 modules).  I have noticed that compared to when FutureLearn launched, a lot of courses on the platform appear to be on the shorter side (2-4 modules) rather than 10-14 module courses that seemed to be the norm when the platform launched.

One annoying thing about all xMOOCs is the assessment piece. Most courses that I undertook just had Quizzes peppered throughout the course. For some, if you got over a certain score you'd also get a certificate of completion (nice!) The quizzes rely mostly on MC questions but every so often you get a "fill in the blank".  Let me tell you that I absolutely hate fill-in-the-blanks! If you mistype something or put a synonym...you miss out on a point.  Another poor assessment use was using "pick as many as are correct" (aka checkboxes), when there is only one right answer in the list.  That should be a radio button.  I think we've all been conditioned by the heuristics of computers to expect more than one box to be ticked when you have more than one correct answer 🙄. Since I wasn't doing this for a grade it doesn't really matter (I could have skipped the quizzes altogether), but it as a designer this kind of stuff irks me at times.  Another poorly thought of element of usability: If you do end up getting less than the minimum score on a quiz, you have to email FutureLearn support to rest a quiz for you.  It seems like a user should be able to reset quizzes after a certain amount of time has elapsed, and the server should be keeping track of how many times a user has reset a quiz.

I have another dozen or so MOOCs on my wishlist on FutureLearn which I might sign-up for early in 2023 to go through.  The problem with new courses is that there is a time limit to complete them.  One of the ways of monetizing the platform is giving participants the option to keep the course by subscribing, or having access to it for a limited time. I guess  I need to start courses one at a time from now on ;-)

Is anyone still on FutureLearn?

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