USING YOUR COURSE FOR RESEARCH

Public-facing online courses can be a useful tool for collecting data for your research as long  as this has been identified as one of the objectives and the method is planned well in
advance.

The Online Courses (OC) team will work with you to ensure your research objectives can be achieved during the scoping phase of your online courses project. We will then liaise with FutureLearn about the kind of research you plan to conduct and how this will be communicated so that learners are aware that they are participating in a research study.

Please note, FutureLearn requires Partners to adhere to the following set of guidelines when publishing learner testimonials which also applies for any research outputs:
“To ensure that your use of comments is GDPR compliant, please contact any learner whose comment you would like to use via the ‘reply’ function and request permission to use the comment,
describing how and where you plan to use it.’

The quote should be attributed to the learner as the learner prefers – using their profile name, or with anonymised attribution eg. Anonymous or A previous learner on this course.”  FutureLearn request that any research informed by data on their platform is shared back in its final form or informally. You may also wish to share your experience with the wider FutureLearn Academic Network. The FutureLearn Academic Network (FLAN) was established in 2013 by a group of academics in order to connect academics and research students based at FutureLearn partner institutions, share research, and explore shared research opportunities. These opportunities include: joint research bids and publications, comparative studies using shared FutureLearn data, course designs, and methods to analyse and evaluate courses.