Stepping into Leadership
A three-week open course on FutureLearn for people moving into their first leadership role in higher education, designed around social learning and built to fit a text-heavy platform.
The brief
Nottingham Business School wanted an open course on FutureLearn for people stepping into a leadership role in higher education for the first time. Aligned to the AHEP framework, three weeks long, free to enrol. The catch was the platform. FutureLearn runs on social learning: every step has a discussion sitting alongside it, and the platform itself is mostly text and video. Any interactive activity has to be embedded through a hosted link.
My role
I designed and built the course end to end with the academic team as subject experts. That covered the structure, the pacing across three weeks, the writing of every step, and the interactive activities that sit inside the text.
How I approached it
I started by mapping the course using ABC Learning Design with the SMEs, so we agreed the shape of the three weeks and where the learners needed to arrive before any writing began. From there I paced the material around the discussion rather than treating it as an afterthought, so learners hit a conversation point after every substantial piece of content and could bring their own context into it.
For the interactive activities I built a small set in H5P and embedded them through hosted links. These were structured reflection prompts and short scenario responses, with automated feedback where it added something, and an exportable reflection document that learners could take with them into their first leadership role. On a text-heavy platform, a few well-placed interactions do more than trying to make everything interactive.
Outcome
The course is live and open to anyone. It has been rated 4.7 out of 5 by learners with over 2,000 enrolments. See the course on FutureLearn.
What I would do differently
Given more time, I would have built one longer branching activity for the trickiest part of the course, where new managers first have to have a difficult conversation with someone they used to work alongside. That is the moment the course points at, and a scenario would let learners practise it rather than just read about it.