Abstract:

A contentious debate amongst educators is the implementation and impact of a sense of belonging this debate are typically defined in campus rich interactions, with little to no notion of online interactions. For many institutions and individual staff members, it is an incredible challenge and has made a significant impact on staff making meaningful, emotional connections with their students in an online learning environment. Creating emotional connections and a sense of belonging is perplexed and convoluted. This paper brings together a wide range of primary data in order to define and analyze the literature on this topic.

This study used a phenomenological methodology with semi-structured interviews. The participants were from a variety of universities and curriculum areas in the United Kingdom and Ireland, consisting of representatives from Queen’s University Belfast, in the Social Sciences, Education and Social Work department; Northumbria University from the Leadership and Human Resource Management department; Liverpool University from the Teacher Education department and Blackpool and The Fylde College from the Leadership, Management, and Lifestyle department.

The results of this study indicate that creating emotional connections and a sense of belonging is fundamental to teaching and learning online. In addition, the findings indicate that not all staff used visible interactions (via web cameras) to develop emotional connections online, the non-visible interactions were also noted as successful, as the asynchronous environment appeared to support students to become more confident and express themselves in a medium that they could not in a face to face environment (Suler, 2004; Wu et al., 2017; Tanis & Postmes, 2007; Scott, 1999). The final recommendation is the importance of more robust, focused training to ensure teachers and students have knowledge of the benefits and drawbacks to emotional connections and sense of belonging, which should alleviate some of the implications and barriers to learning and teaching online.

Keywords:

Visible and non-visible communication, Emotional Connection, Sense of Belonging, lurking, asynchronous, synchronous.