Abstract:

UK higher education is attracting increasing numbers of students with diverse needs, circumstances, backgrounds, and experiences. Some of these groups, such as mature, distance and commuter students who are not based on a university campus, can be under-represented in university decision making, and can experience barriers in terms of their sense of community, belonging, wellbeing and successfully participating in higher education. These groups have much to offer in terms of sharing their experiences with the university, in order to improve things for future students like them.

This paper describes the Positive Digital Communities project, a co-creation project in which students from underrepresented groups worked with universities and sector bodies to co-create a toolkit of resources to support the creation of digital student communities, where students can provide peer support for each other and build a sense of community that does not rely on being on campus. This paper shares the open-source resources that were the outputs of the project, and the evaluations of the outputs from three participating UK universities. It also shares reflections on the benefits and challenges of co-creation with students from underrepresented groups, such as managing time constraints and power dynamics, along with implications and advice for practitioners on supporting students to be active collaborators in future projects.

Keywords:

Belonging, Community, Digital education, Student wellbeing, co-creation.