The student experience

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The student experience is intrinsically linked to the individual’s sense of belonging. Nowhere is this more important than for students on fully online and distance courses.

Campus-based students can gain their sense of belonging from the library, walking across campus to class, the student union, cafes, student-run clubs and societies, etc. Students who don’t, or can’t access campus have a very different experience.

I’ve written about the student experience before:

There are a multitude of ways in which feelings of belonging are established, nurtured and hindered in universities. While the factors that promote belonging vary by person and personality, there are recurring themes within our data, which come together to form four foundational areas: connection, inclusion, support, and autonomy.

‘The four foundations of belonging at university’ by Anna Jackson, Gail Capper, and Sunday Blake

I’ve often refered to this kind of areas of the student experience as ‘pastoral support’ in such that it’s not academic support, but still areas of student life that need attention, especially for fully online students.

Yes, prepare the materials and systems to encourage and include students, but what about what they need to help them get there, to find and interact with the materials you’ve so carefully crafted for them?

This isn’t to say that campus, face-to-face students don’t need this too. They do.

Students who received diverse and inclusive learning materials felt they were being better supported by their institution to prepare for increasingly globalised careers and/or to enter a diversifying graduate workplace. Students who were invited to contribute to the curriculum, either from their lived experience or academic interests, to make it more diverse and inclusive felt more connected to their cohort and academic staff and higher levels of autonomy over their learning experiences. When educators were flexible about the topics that students could write their assignments on or were open to student suggestions on course content, students reported being able to rectify non-inclusive content through their own scholarship increased their perception of the inclusive content of the course and their autonomy over it.

‘The four foundations of belonging at university’ by Anna Jackson, Gail Capper, and Sunday Blake

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash