When do I need to be online?

Content delivery methods

Courses on FutureLearn are designed to be self-guided, which means the content is made up of pre-recorded videos or written content which can be browsed in your own time. 

We don't generally have any live teaching sessions in our courses, and learner to learner interaction happens in our comments section and such discussions can be added to at any time. If there is any content of your course which will be delivered live, such as a Zoom lecture event or a Facebook video meet, then this will be advertised within the course content. Such events are not usually compulsory to attend to complete your course, so don't worry if you aren't able to join. You don’t need to be online at the same time as the lead educator or other students.

For more guidance on how learning works on FutureLearn for your first course, please read our guide What to expect when your course starts.

Course start time

If you have joined an upcoming course (i.e. a course which hasn't yet started) the course itself will be available from midnight (00:00 UTC) on the date shown on the course page. If you live in a different time zone, Your Learning will show what time the course starts in your local time zone.

Planning your time

On the course description page you can see the Course duration in weeks and the Weekly study time in hours. The course duration describes the number of weeks of content in the course (with courses broken down into weeks and steps).

For courses you have joined for free (apart from our sponsored courses) your free access time will be limited to the exact duration of the course, and the content from each week of the course will be released on a weekly basis. You can upgrade or become an Unlimited subscriber in order to get long-term access to all of the course materials from each week of the course straight away. 

If you are on a course with limited weekly access then you can see the dates for each week's content release from within the course itself (see below screenshot for an example). 

For example if you join a weekly access limited course today you can access all of the content from week 1 straight away, but you will need to wait one calendar week to access week 2 of the course.

[Image description: A screenshot of the course view on week 2 of an example course, with a padlock symbol highlighted in the left-hand navigation panel]

To move on to the next week straight away, you can either upgrade or become an Unlimited subscriber.