How to use online courses in your teaching

We have a wide range of short online courses available that take four hours in total, on interesting cross-curricular topics including science, business and dance. You could start with the courses to help your students learn productively and safely online.

FutureLearn is free to access with a valid email address. Your students can register and access any of the courses available. If you send them links to the courses you want them to complete, they will have access for up to four weeks. See the How to use FutureLearn guide for more information.

If you need a stand-alone lesson that you can complete with a class, each of our courses has a lesson plan explaining the activities and what you need, including which sections of the course you need to use.

You can use our schemes of work to deliver three connected lessons on a topic, with details of the activities and everything you need.

Within each course, there are several tasks and activities. Although the FutureLearn platform does not have the functionality for teachers to monitor students’ progress through the course, you can set students deadlines to complete certain tasks. They can undertake these tasks offline and send you their completed work for assessment.

Each of these courses has a selection of final tasks for you to choose from – you can select the option that’s right for your students and needs. Your students can write a reflective summary, take a short test, or complete an individual project. These tasks are available on our website.

If you have live online sessions with students, you can also use the suggested discussion topics for each course to structure your session, whether that’s with video or text chat.

If your students have the resources to take part in group work remotely, many of the activities from the courses can be adapted. Websites such as Padlet are available for students to take part in asynchronous discussions, sharing work and commenting on each other’s posts.

If you have the option to conduct webinars with your students, this could provide an opportunity for students to present and discuss their work synchronously. They can discuss their learning from the online course with other students in real-time. This option could also give you the opportunity to answer questions or explore a topic in more details.