Meet the FutureLearn Learning Team
Who are the Learning Team; and what exactly do they do? In this blog post we find out the answers to these questions and hear about the team members’ different routes into learning design.
Matt Jenner, Head of Learning @mattjenner
Education tops all. And it can be so much better. I studied Interactive Multimedia for my undergraduate, my final project was a website for children to learn about science — Learning Circuits — and it’s still thriving fifteen years on. I sharpened my mind in UCL’s Digital Education team as the distance education advisor and while at UCL I completed my postgraduate degree at the Institute of Education as evening study. FutureLearn was the highlight of my day job — I jumped over the fence four years ago. I live in Scotland and enjoy the outdoors.
Things I’ve worked on at FutureLearn:
I’m proud of building up the Learning team who are here to champion the most effective learning experiences and to play our part in transforming access to education. I believe strongly that a learning company needs a dedicated team but also a culture of learning, thinking about learners, championing a social learning experience and understanding what’s really working with insight and analysis.
At FutureLearn I’ve mainly bookended a ‘course’. Firstly I’ve prioritised Learning Design as a key part in the course development process. I’ve also championed course review and performance, primarily by understanding learner behavioural insights from data and understanding impact via surveys and reviews. I’ve also worked with product teams to develop the in-course experience and been part in forming the Experience Working Group — a cross-functional team who champion a universal perspective on our learners.
Another significant element is ramping up our validation and accreditation, effectively building the foundations for academic credit. This plays a big part of building quality, meaningful and stackable credentials which go on to provide pathways for valuable, credible courses for learners.
Come talk to me if you want to know more about:
- Pedagogy and learning design (although I will refer you to the experts in the Learning team!)
- Learning technology and building a learning platform that scales while remaining effective.
- Gaining meaningful insight from data and learner / customer voice.
- Why digital education is just as effective as a physical classroom or campus.
I’d love your ideas on:
Developing a global exchange of universal academic credit for awarding, stacking and recognition. Effective learning outcomes with social learning pedagogies.
What I’m reading:
How Learning Happens — Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice By Paul A. Kirschner and Carl Hendrick. Why? It’s unwrapping a huge amount of research and making it highly accessible to the reader. It ignites the brain.
Rummi Bassi, Learning Designer
I started working in education in a Further Education College in Birmingham. The college was only just embracing eLearning as a method to support learners outside of college hours, so I feel like I was able to enter their journey at the ground level. As soon as I started working with their VLE (Moodle), I was hooked.
Initially, I was working on Entry-level (pre-GCSE) to Level 2 (Higher GCSE) courses in the ESOL department to develop self-study resources for learners but the role quickly expanded to cover the whole college and a range of courses from taught to blended modes of delivery up to Level 5.
After 5 years of working in the FE sector, I spent another 5 years working in Higher Education on blended and fully distance programmes for Undergraduate and Postgraduate courses in Canvas. During this time, I decided to consolidate my learning by taking an MA in E-learning Design and Development and a Senior Fellowship in the Higher Education Academy.
I’m passionate about extending access to education to as many people as possible and feel that Online Learning is one of the key methods of achieving this aim. I left Higher Education and joined FutureLearn in 2020 to join an organisation that shares this vision.
Things I’ve worked on at FutureLearn:
Since joining FutureLearn I have worked on the re-run of the ‘How to Create a Great Future Learn Course’ and T-levels.
Come talk to me if you want to know more about:
Universal Design and Accessibility, Constructive Alignment and Online Pedagogy.
I’d love your ideas on:
How you meet individual learner needs, the challenges you face and the successes you’ve had.
What I’m reading:
Rethinking models of feedback for learning: the challenge of design by David Boud & Elizabeth Molloy
Felicity Parsisson, Learning Designer (she/her)
I trained as an English Language teacher (CELTA) in 2009 and taught widely across a variety of contexts before taking both the Cambridge DELTA and MA English Teaching for Adults at Leeds Beckett. These courses gave me a solid grounding in pedagogy and learner-centred education, applicable beyond the language teaching context.
While working at King’s College London the opportunity to be involved in ambitious online digital transformation came up, and I jumped at the chance to move into the world of online education. Being part of the King’s team that created Basic English 1: Elementary and Basic English 2: Pre-Intermediate introduced me to FutureLearn, ultimately sparking a move so I could concentrate full-time on online education. I live in Leeds and spend a ridiculous amount of time listening to podcasts (probably why I’m a massive advocate for increasing use of audio in our courses!).
Things I’ve worked on at FutureLearn:
Since joining FutureLearn in 2018 I’ve spent a lot of my time thinking about how to create guidance, processes and templates which could speed up or simplify the course design process. This has been as much to meet our own in-house requirements as to share across the Partnership. My conviction is that good courses are first designed, then built — and before detailed design gets underway it pays to spend some time on what we call ‘proposition design’ — gathering and agreeing on requirements from key stakeholders. This ensures the final courses are aligned with what was intended, gives visibility across the whole process to everyone involved, and means there’s room to have some fun in the design and build! Some favourites I’ve worked on at FutureLearn are How to Teach Online and the Institute of Coding Digital Skills for the Workplace collection.
Come talk to me if you want to know more about:
Large scale proposition design, strategies to offer differentiation and choice for learners, creating narrative and stories in courses, ways to streamline course plan and design
I’d love your ideas on:
Challenges in processes for course planning and design, your strategies for appealing to diverse cohorts, evidencing learning
What I’m reading:
Good Services — How to Design Services that Work by Lou Downe Why? I’m trying to see where service design and learning design could crossover, with a view to simplifying the course build lifecycle.
Andrew Morton, Learning Designer (he/him)
Originally from Glasgow, the Scottishness of my accent has been softened by living south of the border for around 10 years. I studied Psychology with Biology at St Andrews University before making the move to Exeter where I completed a PGCE in Primary Teaching, and subsequently moved to London to teach Year 2 for several years.
Having cut my teeth, and lost some hair, teaching in central London, I moved out to North Carolina on a teaching exchange programme. It was a great opportunity to not only work with teachers from the US, but also teachers from across the Southern Hemisphere who were part of the same programme. I taught Elementary School Science and 2nd grade in rural Carolina, and completed my MA online through the IoE at UCL at the same time. The teaching gave me a good perspective on differing pedagogical approaches, and the MA gave me a good insight of how it feels to be an online learner.
I returned to London in 2017 and decided that a career in online learning was for me. I worked as an Instructional Designer at the start-up Blackbullion, delivering financial literacy learning to university students. In early 2019 I moved to PwC where I worked as Head of Learning Content on their Learning Lab proposition. In July 2020 I joined FutureLearn as a Learning Designer.
Things I’ve worked on at FutureLearn:
Creating an online repository of resources to ensure partners can deliver high quality courses at pace, known as the Learning Library.
Come talk to me if you want to know more about:
The direction of travel for online learning. Effective learning design to engage diverse learners.
I’d love your ideas on:
How to design learning platforms that can clearly evidence learning.
What I’m reading:
Make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C Brown, Mark A. McDaniel, Henry L. Roediger III. Why? An interesting, evidence based review of effective strategies for learning.
Monty King, Learning Designer (he/him)
I’m from Perth in Australia and studied English Lit. and Political Science with honours in Peacekeeping Studies. After graduating I joined the niche career of ‘travelling rugby playing English teacher’ because a) I wasn’t good enough at rugby to be a professional and b) I speak English. I taught adults in schools and universities for 15 years, including 3 years in Dili, Timor-Leste, where I ran an English language school.
Back in Perth I enrolled in a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia in 2015. My thesis is an ethnographic study of online learning in Timor-Leste, and I did field work in Dili from 2015–2017, interviewing Timorese students and teachers, and blending online courses (mostly on FutureLearn) with face to face study groups. You can see the papers I’ve written so far here on Google Scholar.
I came to London in late 2017 and started at FutureLearn as a Partnership Manager in early 2018, before I jumped ship to join the Learning team.
Things I’ve worked on at FutureLearn:
I’m really proud to have worked on the How to Teach Online rapid response course over lockdown, which has now been taken by over 80,000 teachers around the world. As a partnership manager I worked closely on the University of Newcastle Australia’s Bachelor of Arts degree program on FutureLearn, and I got to spend some time with their incredible team putting 36 programs (and counting) on our platform. I organised the Asia Pacific Partner Forum at the University of Melbourne in November 2019 and I’m working on the next FutureLearn Educator and Learning Designer Meetup which we are going to present in the form of a FutureLearn course.
Come talk to me if you want to know more about:
MOOCs4Development, academic neocolonialism and Southern theory, action research, conferences-as-courses, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), constructive alignment, communities of practice.
I’d love your ideas on:
How we can truly transform access to education, not just in the UK and countries where most of our partners are based, but in the global South, where demand for education is high but educational opportunities may be limited.
What I’m reading:
Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, by Paul Willis.
Why? It’s a classic ethnographic account of a group of high school students in the Midlands in the early 1970s- the title says it all really.
If you’re interested in learning design, we run a free quarterly newsletter about all things pedagogy and course creation: the Learning Design Bulletin. Each issue focuses on one or two areas involved in designing and building great courses and is open to everyone, whether actively involved in FutureLearn courses, or simply interested to find out more about pedagogy or our approach to learning. Sign up here http://bit.ly/fldesignbulletin
