Scottish Higher Education Developers October 2018 | Page 22

FOSTERING A COMMUNITY OF
LEARNERS WHILE SUPPORTING
FLEXIBLE LEARNING
Susie Schofield, University of Dundee
How do you foster a community of learners with over a thousand national and
international students, working as busy health professionals in different time zones
and work patterns? Students who can’t commit to synchronous albeit online meetings?
These were the challenges facing us on Dundee’s Masters in Medical Education.
For the first module we split the 150+
cohort into groups of 20 and introduced
weekly activities supported by
asynchronous discussion boards. For the
opening activity the tutors introduced
themselves, including ‘something
memorable’. Students were asked to do
likewise, creating a light-hearted ice-
breaker to initiate community. In line with
social learning theory, weekly meaningful
A supportive slice of virtual lemon meringue cake
and challenging tasks were set aligned
shared just before the assignment deadline
to the module learning outcomes. A
PhD student, a near-peer who had previously completed the module, managed the
dialogue, probing, supporting and challenging. She summarised the themes, recording a
conversation with the module lead to pull together each week’s discussion.
We decided against measuring students’ posts, either quantitatively or qualitatively. If a
student made no contribution we checked whether they had technical problems. Very
often this non-confrontational contact was enough to encourage engagement. In this
way we have emulated where on-campus students are broken into smaller groups for
debate, then brought back for large group summarising.
But have we developed a community of learners? Students’ peer formative feedback and
supportive posts coming up to the assignment deadline (including slices of virtual cake)
makes us think yes, as does students recognising and greeting each other in subsequent
modules. Initial evaluations also look promising.
18
Celebrating 25 years of SHED