FutureLearn’s RTE Review

What is it?

The new FutureLearn Rich Text Editor (RTE) offers a departure on the reliance on MarkDown for text formatting on steps. At present it is available only on Article steps but if the roll out is successful and positively received it is likely to be visible on more steps soon.

The article step form now has an input box for article content with a tool bar that allows quick access to all the features that were previously allowed with the markdown formatting.

Useful Features

The first and possibly the most important feature for ease of upload is that the RTE will read formatting copied over from Word templates. The includes the Heading level, Font style and subscripts. Alongside this, images, lists and tables are also successfully copied over. Further formatting of lists may be required but the essential data entry pulls across fine.

The functions on the tool bar are well-labelled and fairly self-explanatory and include:

• Heading level
• Bold/Italics
• Bullet and Numbered List
• Link
• Anchor
• Quote
• Horizontal Line
• Table
• Image link or upload
• Media upload (YouTube or Vzaar)
• Undo
• Extra function with:
  • subscript
  • superscript
  • Code
  • Code Block
  • Maths

If you need further details of their use then read the guide here.     

Improved Workflow

The RTE certainly makes it quicker to work on steps. With the WYSIWYG way of working you can see exactly what your step will look prior to saving making formatting adjustments as appropriate.

In general most of the text features were fairly easy to use in Markdown as soon as you learned what to do but for tables it was generally a bit of a pain. Sometimes you had to go backwards and forwards a number of times before you got it right. It’s now dead easy to set the number of columns and rows, add and remove them as well as selecting headers for either.

Another nice feature is the ability to drag tables images and videos around the editor form. This means that you don’t have to re insert assets into steps or spend time cutting and pasting text around them.

With images you also have the ability to make them smaller and allow wrap around text. Not something I’ve done yet but in certain situations this might prove very useful.

The last major improvement is the integration with the mathematical equation editor MathJax. This now has a simple pop up box with a preview s when you add you equation it automatically shows you what you have written, an excellent aid when troubleshooting. You also have easy options for in line or centrally justified to control how the equation is placed.

The one major criticism is the space given over for ALT text. This only shows 60 characters in a tiny box. In order to write helpful ALT text you will have to draft it in a separate editor and the paste it into place. PEs will then have to do the process in reverse to review. Hopefully with enough pressure this is something that we can change in the future.

Roundup

All in all the RTE is a great improvement to the platform and will hopefully be rolled out to other areas as soon as possible.

It makes upload a quicker process and if the initial template is well written then the time from upload to publication should be significantly reduced. It does mean that we may need to think further about template formatting and academic induction to make the most of the savings that the RTE offers in this area.