Fostering a sense of belonging through online qualification events

Abstract There has been much interest in how to develop a sense of belonging to an academic institution over the last twenty years, given the evidence that this improves student retention, satisfaction and attainment. Fostering a sense of belonging involves both psychological and sociological aspects; students need to feel like they belong and are valued by their institution, and this is developed through interactions with staff and peers. Research carried out since 2020 into belonging online has focused primarily on course-based teaching initiatives. This article will describe our 18-month pilot on a fully online qualification developing a greater sense of belonging for our students based on qualification-wide online events and their impact on student engagement and sense of belonging. Qualification-wide events are events that are open to all students on a qualification or programme, such as a law degree, as compared to events which are only available to students on a specific course. It will highlight some of the barriers students perceive to building online community, including a lack of confidence, and discuss the students’ views that the responsibility for developing community lies with the university.


Introduction
Universities are increasingly recognising the importance of students feeling a sense of belonging to their academic community.Research has highlighted that a sense of belonging is linked with improved student attainment and learner satisfaction, and reduced attrition rates (Peacock & Cowan, 2019).It can also help address issues of wellbeing and isolation; students who feel a greater sense of belonging to their institution generally have lower levels of stress, anxiety and depression (for example, Skread & Rogers, 2014).However the concept of a sense of belonging can be vague and difficult to define, let alone encourage or develop.A large study into belonging in 2022 began its report with these words: "belonging can still be seen as a vague and indefinable concept.Where exactly do feelings of belonging come from in a university setting?What factors enhance or hinder it?And what can institutions do to better facilitate feelings of belonging?"(Blake et al., 2022, p. 4).
our Belonging Project focused on the last question in the above quote, with the aim of facilitating the students' feelings of belonging to the Law School.The project adopted Alyson et al's definition of belonging to an academic community: "a subjective feeling of value and respect derived from a reciprocal relationship to an external referent that is built on a foundation of shared experiences, beliefs or personal characteristics" (2013, p. 1026).It focused on a community of practice approach to the development of belonging, providing opportunities for social learning and peer interaction (Lave, 1991;Lave & Wenger, 1991;Wenger, 1998;Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Traynor, 2020).The project was designed for undergraduate and postgraduate law students studying a fully online qualification.our distance learning programme is flexible, so students do not stay in the same course or year group from one individual course to the next.Due to the size of our cohorts, it is quite possible that students will not meet the same students or tutors again in their studies.This is further compounded by the flexibility of tutorials which are open to all students and offered several times a week.The opportunity to develop communities of practice within courses is therefore more limited than for face-to-face or blended education.our project therefore focused on online community building at a programme level.
As higher education moved online at the start of the CoVID19 pandemic, research on developing belonging within the virtual classroom has focused mainly on belonging at course level.The role of qualification or programme-based events and opportunities to interact with staff and students is less understood and valued.This article will focus on the evaluation of our pilot project.It will explain why and how the open University (oU) Law School introduced a programme of qualification-wide guest lectures, coffee events and a blog to facilitate a greater sense of belonging.We will explore our early evaluation of these activities and the impact of them on the students' sense of belonging to an academic community.

What we know about belonging online
There is an abundance of riches when looking for academic literature about belonging to an academic institution.An online search within our university library in April 2023 for "sense of belonging online" brought up 253,4202 peer reviewed academic journal articles.The methodology adopted for this literature review was therefore to find existing summaries of literature reviews (dated 2019) and to carry out a citation search.A general library search using the same search terms (sense of belonging online) looked at peer reviewed articles from 2020 to 2023, organised by relevance, and the authors reviewed the abstract of the most relevant 50 articles.
There are many different theoretical perspectives on belonging.Maslow identified belonging alongside love as the third tier of his hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943); Tinto considered the role of belonging in retention and integration into higher education (Spady, 1970;Tinto, 1993), while Bourdieu's cultural capital theory has been linked by subsequent academics to belonging (Bourdieu, 1977;Carruthers Thomas, 2015).Alternatively, Garrison et al., 2000 community of inquiry model is often linked to the idea of belonging.
This project focused on the role of communities of practice in developing a greater sense of belonging to an academic community.Wenger and Lave's theory identified the importance of social learning and peer interaction for learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991).They claimed that new learners start by observing others (for example, peers and staff ) and by taking part in activities and interaction develop practices, negotiate meaning and form identity (Wenger, 1998, p. 96).For a community of practice to develop there needs to be mutual engagement, a joint enterprise and a shared repertoire (Wenger, 1998).
As online activity and interaction has grown over the last 20 years, the concept of communities of practice has extended to those geographically dispersed but connected online (see Kear, 2010, p. 17-19).Delahunty et al. (2014) argue that the community of practice theory is ideal for the online environment, given its emphasis on joint activity.This engagement in a joint enterprise or practice is easily integrated into learning in individual online courses through students working together on academic tasks.Research carried out after the transition from face-to-face to online education due to the CoVID19 pandemic made suggestions on how to develop communities of practice within courses.For example, supporting students' social presence online (Mulrooney & Kelly, 2020); groupwork within online synchronous sessions (Abu et al., 2021); integrating student voice into learning and course design (Thacker et al., 2022); and ensuring a mix of asynchronous and synchronous learning (Garrad & Page, 2022).
Focusing on courses when building community can be problematic for a number of reasons.The length of the course may restrict or curtail the development of a sense of belonging.Building an online community takes longer than in the face-toface environment, and frequently comes to an end when the course ends (Brown, 2001).Some students can also feel isolated when the learners change from one course to the next, or the courses bring together cohorts from different programmes or studying at different intensities.This means that sustaining longer-term relationships can be difficult and can impact on students' wellbeing (Jones et al., 2019).Multiple studies have found that a lack of sense of community is a key issue for online learners leading to poorer student satisfaction, higher feelings of isolation and higher rates of attrition (for example, see Delahunty et al 2014).our research therefore aimed to explore whether a sense of belonging online could also be developed at programme or qualification level, through the encouragement of a community of practice around students' identity as law students and potential future legal professionals.
To develop a sense of belonging requires both a psychological and a sociological element (Thomas, 2012).Psychologically, a student subjectively needs to feel like they are connected and part of the group, "being accepted, valued, included, and encouraged by others….feeling oneself to be an important part of the life and activity of the class" (Goodenow, 1993, p. 25).Sociologically, a sense of belonging also requires the opportunity for interaction and shared experiences with peers and staff.In order to systematically develop belonging and community online, we focused on three elements: an opportunity for joint activity or practice, a welcoming and inclusive environment, and the creation of spaces for online synchronous peer interactions between students and staff.

The belonging project
The open University (oU) is one of the leading providers of distance learning education within the U.K. with over 208,308 students, 7,000 of which are studying within the Law School.our students often study part-time, combining their education with employment and/or caring responsibilities.Many of our students study with a disability.However recently we have seen a growing trend of students studying at a full-time intensity.
The Law School offers a blended tuition model and students are supported by a course tutor.However, despite the support available, distance learning can be isolating, which can impact on student mental health and self-confidence (Heaton-Shrestha et al., 2009).In the face-to-face setting students have the opportunity to engage with other students informally while waiting for classes to start, which aids the development of support communities and social learning spaces (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Traynor, 2020).This does not occur organically online, and student feedback in 2019-20 underlined the importance of relationships and belonging.Three previous projects conducted within the Law School explored ways of improving wellbeing and reducing isolation through wellbeing focus groups, peer mentoring and full-time intensity student support.During the evaluation of these projects, students talked about the benefits of engaging with other students across the qualification.They valued the opportunity to meet peers and staff online and they considered this was the most important way of developing relationships, reducing isolation and feeling connected to the Law School (Edwards et al., 2021;Jones et al., 2020).
We set up a specific Belonging Project in December 2021 for 18 months to replicate online the opportunities for informal meetings of students with staff and their peers.We planned a programme of online qualification events including guest lectures, student coffee events and careers events which were open to all Law students.A coherent programme was offered allowing students the opportunity to meet peers and staff online at least three times a month.We also set up a blog on the Law School website, inviting students, staff and alumni to contribute a blog on any topic of legal interest.
In terms of attendance, our guest lectures were the most popular events.Law academics provided a 45-minute presentation followed by a 15-minute question and answer session covering a range of topics including substantive legal issues and skills-based sessions.Lectures were run using Adobe Connect, an online platform which students were familiar with from tutorial attendance.Students were asked to register to attend the event using Eventbrite and we limited each lecture to 200 or 250 students, opening registration four weeks before each event.The event was usually completely reserved within 48 hours of registration opening.
Students were also given the opportunity to meet their peers in informal student-led coffee events.Students volunteered to run an event and suggested its focus.The students led the event and facilitated discussion, which was scheduled for an hour.
For a number of events this led to students exchanging contact details to keep in touch after the event.Support was available during the event in case of difficulties.
Finally, our careers and employability service arranged a package of online careers events which covered general employability skills through to specialist legal career information.

Methodology
After the first six months of the project, we reviewed the quantitative attendance data and recordings of the first 10 guest lectures, and the attendance data of the first six student coffee events.We also carried out small scale semi-structured interviews with students and the tutor who had participated in the project to evaluate what had gone well and what had not worked as expected.The very small numbers involved in the interviews limited the overall conclusions we could draw on the effectiveness and impact of the project.However, we were able to use the information collated to inform the running of the project during the following 12 months.
At the end of the project, we again carried out a quantitative review of the attendance and recording data of the online events to assess student engagement with the project.As these events were all voluntary and were not related to any credit bearing courses the students studied, attendance at the online events synchronously or listening to the recording asynchronously suggested students found a value in the events (Massingham & Herrington, 2006).We also considered the number of blogs submitted and whether these were from staff or students, and the readership of the blog.
Finally, we also surveyed a random selection of law students regarding their understanding of belonging to an academic community, their involvement in the project and its impact on them.The survey was short (seven questions) to encourage completion.We decided that a survey would be the best way to obtain the data because it had the potential of reaching as many students as possible.All questions were constructed by the research team and complied with the oU's ethical policies relating to research.Full approval was obtained from relevant ethical committees before the administration of the survey.We used a Likert scale to determine an overall belonging scale for each student; although this is subjective and does not always represent how people think, its limited use did enable us to obtain the information we required to compare different aspects of belonging (Salopek, 2004).
The survey incorporated closed questions to allow the collection of quantitative data including the inclusion of our belonging scale to allow students to identify their level of belonging.This information was then used to determine the students overall belonging.open questions were used to explore student views in more detail and offered the potential for gathering rich qualitative data.
This was issued to 1000 students who were eligible for inclusion in the survey at the end of the academic year in July 2023.Sadly only 14 responded, possibly due to the timing as students were not always checking their emails during the summer break.While the limited number of responses is a weakness of our evaluation, we felt there was value in sharing the students' views, not least because it relates to some of the literature on the area of belonging therefore giving limited validity to our findings.The survey was analysed by the team using the thematic approach based on the work of Braun and Clarke (2006).The authors used an inductive approach, in order to be led by the data and student responses.The responses were coded individually by each author, who then individually generated relevant themes.The authors then discussed and reviewed the themes, before defining and naming them.

Guest lectures
There were 22 guest lectures between December 2021 and June 2023, and all events were fully booked on Eventbrite with between 200-250 registered to attend.To establish attendance the attendance record for the online room on the relevant day and time was reviewed, with duplicate entries (where students entered the room more than once) being excluded.We also excluded all students who stayed for less than five minutes in the room (the online events being one hour long).Finally, the tutor chairing the event and guest lecturer were also excluded.All students were counted individually as a single positive attendance, regardless of the length of time they stayed over five minutes.
There were 22 events held between December 2021 and June 2023, 16 of which were presentations on substantive law (although unconnected with any modules students were taking) and six were legal-skills based.The substantive lectures were designed to give an opportunity for mutual engagement in a legal discussion, while the skills-based sessions gave opportunity for the development of a shared identity as law students (both important elements of developing a community of practice (Wenger, 1998).
Taking the highest attendance, between one and 104 students attended each lecture.The lecture with one person attending was an outlier with concerns subsequently expressed by the tutor hosting the event that there were technical issues on the day preventing students from entering the online room.We have therefore excluded this event when analysing the data for those who attended live.
The mean average attendance was 59 students at each session.This does mean that only 25% of those registered to attend came to the event, which is a very small conversion rate.During the project we delayed the opening of registration to three-tofour weeks before the event.While this increased attendance, a large number of students did not attend despite having registered online.
All guest lectures were recorded; unlike the attendance data, it was not possible to separate out those who only watched part of the recording or those who watched it more than once.This is a limitation in the data.As at 9th August 2023 there were between nine and 2,481 views of each recording.The events which have taken place towards the end of the academic year have had fewer views as there has been less time for students to watch these.An average of 178 students watched each lecture, and therefore on average 237 students attended or listened to the recording of each lecture (Tables 1 and 2).
When comparing the substantive lectures with the skills-based guest lectures, the skills-based lectures were more popular with 397 attendances over 6 events, leading to an average of 66 attending each session.The substantive lectures had 854 attendances over 16 events, with an average of 53 students.The student preference for skills-based sessions is even starker when those watching the recordings is taken into account: the legal problem-solving session alone was viewed 2,481 times.There were 3045 views of the 6 skills-based lectures with an average number of 507 views per recording, meaning 573 students engaged with each skills session.The number of students watching the legal problem question recording was disproportionate compared to the other events.Excluding this recording, 113 students on average watched each skills-based recording which means that 179 students engaged with each skills session.By contrast there were 881 views of the substantive lectures with an average of 55 views for each recording, meaning an average of 108 students attended or watched each of the substantive lectures.This preference for skills-based guest lectures is consistent with the formation of students' identity as law students and potential legal practitioners (Wenger, 1998).

Student coffee events
There were eighteen coffee events which took place between March 22 and April 23.The events were not recorded.Each event was facilitated by one student, who suggested the topic based on their own lived experiences.The student briefly introduced the topic and reflected on their experiences, and then encouraged discussion amongst those in attendance.No staff attended the event to encourage peer to peer interaction, although a tutor was available during each session and could be contacted by the student facilitator in case of technical or other problems.The tutor was not called upon by any of the students during the events.The coffee events were designed to allow time for students to interact socially and develop peer relationships with those with shared backgrounds and experiences (Preece, 2000;Delahunty, 2014) (Table 3).Student facilitators reported that students attending the session did have lived experience of the topic under discussion.The most popular sessions were those discussing mental wellbeing, living abroad while studying, studying when over 55 years and studying with dyslexia.Two sessions had only one student attend.The coffee event for veterans was advertised very shortly before the date, and was of interest to a limited number of students.The coffee event on dyslexia took place after another session on the same topic earlier in the year which was very well attended, and therefore students may have been less interested in attending a second session on the same subject.
The coffee events were attended in total by 124 students, although some students did attend more than one session.Between one and 15 students attended each event, with an average of seven students.While these numbers are much smaller than for the guest lectures, the smaller group size would allow for greater interaction between students.This is likely to increase the sense of belonging, as research has shown that the sense of community is impacted by the extent of interaction between members of the group (Exter et al., 2009).

Blog
As well as the online events, the project also started an externally facing blog for staff, students and alumni.The intention was to provide a space where staff and students could exchange views on an asynchronous basis.Between 25 May 2022 (when the blog started) and 31 July 2023 there were 49 blogs published, an average of 3.5 blogs a month.Twenty-eight blogs were authored by academic staff, 19 were authored by students and two by alumni.There was therefore a good balance between staff and student publications.
During this 14-month period, there were 5,193 views of the Law School blog, an average of 370 views each month.The blogs appear therefore to have been read by a number of different readers (students, staff and members of the public) and has developed into a space where staff and student views can be shared.Asynchronous methods of community building are particularly difficult given the separation of students and staff and a lack of direct interaction (Delahunty, 2014).The blog therefore appears to be one method of encouraging the exchanging of views and ideas asynchronously across staff and students (Table 4).

Survey
A survey was issued to explore students' views of belonging, and the responses were coded and developed into themes as explained in the Methodology section above.This section will consider first the three open questions, before detailing the responses to the four closed questions.
The first question was an open question which asked students "what do you understand belonging to an academic community means?"A number of themes emerged including: • Togetherness with students using terms such as "sharing", "inclusion" "being with liked minded people".This reflects one of Wenger's three pillars -a shared repertoire (Wenger, 1998).
• Support with students identifying the need for support from their community with comments such as "having support of a tutor, resources online", "peer support" and "support from tutors".• Learning from each other with many students commenting on idea that the community was a place of learning, discussion and debate.Again, this can be found in Wenger's ideas about mutual engagement (1998).
The third question was also an open question: "Thinking about belonging to the Law School, what makes you feel like you belong?"Again, there were a number of themes in response to this question including: • Remoteness with the students acknowledging the nature of the oU provision is based on a distance learning model which students felt hindered the formation of communities.Students also acknowledged that "I knew this would be the case when enrolling".This reflects Mulrooney and Kelly (2020) findings that the remote nature of distance learning is a barrier to building community.• Lack of contact with academics with students commenting on a lack of contact with their tutor, while others wanted more contact with tutors than they received.• Lack of confidence was also identified as impacting on belonging, with comments including "I can lack self-confidence and feel that I don't belong" and "[feeling] I am climbing a mountain".The fourth question was also an open question and asked students "what could the Law School do to help you feel more like you belong to our academic community?"A number of suggestions were made including: • Individual academics contacting students was a key theme with many students suggesting their tutor should proactively contact them more.The importance placed on interaction with staff reflects the fundamental role of interaction and interpersonal relationships for community building and belonging (Delahunty, 2014).• The institution creating opportunities for engagement was mentioned as distinct from individual academics.Students suggested "the university" should reach out more to students, and an example was given of the opportunity to meet face-to-face or offering regional meetings.Thomas (2012) stressed the need for sociological aspects of belonging, including enabling opportunities online for interaction between peers and staff.• Supporting students to develop confidence was also a key theme with one student stating, "My fellow students seem to just form groups and such at the beginning of term(s) -I always want too -but I hold myself back by not trying to engage."Another student identified age as an issue with confidence stating, "As a very mature student, I feel a bit of an interloper".• Not wanting to engage in community events with some students identifying that they did not wish to be part of a community, or not having the time to engage.These students wanted to focus on their study.Delahunty (2014) describes this as "the elephant in the room." Key to our survey was the concept of a belonging index which was explored in questions two, five and six.Students were initially asked to rate their belonging on a scale from 0 (no feeling of belonging) to 5 (Feel I very much belong) for each of the following: The students' score for each part of the institution was added together to give an overall score, or belonging index, for the university, faculty, Law School and individual course.There was a maximum score of 70 for each sector, with each score being converted to a percentage (Table 5).
We also aggregated the individual students' belonging index across all four sectors, which enabled us to compare the belonging index for individual students with the number of different types of engagement with the Belonging Project, to see if there was any correlation.There were six possible types of engagement: attending guest lectures, attending student coffee events, attending careers events, writing a blog, reading a blog and "other".Students included being part of a WhatsApp group, attending tutorials and attending a summer school under the "other" category (Table 6).
Results from the survey was mixed, with two students who did not engage at all with the Belonging Project reporting a relatively high sense of belonging, while a student who reported no sense of belonging to any sector of the university had engaged with three different parts of the project.Interestingly there is a correlation between having a higher sense of belonging and attending fewer events, as indicated by the overall trend line above.This could suggest that the greater the sense of belonging to the institution, the fewer types of engagement students have with the project.Alternatively, attending more events could reduce the students' feeling of belonging.It is necessary though to consider the limitations of the survey given the small numbers, and the likelihood that the students who responded were the most committed or had strong views about this subject.The causal relationship betweena students' sense of belonging and attending events is unclear given the questions asked and the small data set.However, given the central importance of participating in joint activities and mutual engagement in the theory of community of practice (Wenger, 1998), this is an area that needs further research to explore the causal relationship between attending and belonging, as it would be expected that attending events would help contribute to a community of practice and improve belonging, rather than reduce it (Table 6).
Finally, question seven asked students whether they considered engaging in the Belonging Project had impacted on their sense of belonging to an academic community.The impact the Belonging Project had on a students' sense of belonging was unclear, probably due to the limited data set.The majority of students felt engagement with the project had no impact on their sense of belonging.Students who considered the project had positively impacted on their sense of belonging engaged with slightly fewer types of events (1.66) than students who felt that engagement had had no impact (1.85).However, given the number of students, this is statistically insignificant.Students who were unsure about the impact of the project engaged with slightly more different types of events (2.3).Considering the different types of events individually, attending a careers event was most likely to positively impact a students' sense of belonging (Table 7).

Focus groups
As detailed above, a small-scale evaluation was carried out after the first six months of the project through an individual interview with the tutor supporting the project and four student interviews.Despite the small numbers involved, we analysed the transcripts of the interviews to identify themes in the same as was as described above for the survey.Some interesting themes emerged which fed into the development  , c, RB Positive * c -careers event, GL -guest lecture, o -other, RB -read a blog, sc -student coffee event, WB -write a blog of the project.We have included information about these interviews below as the themes which emerged were similar to those in the survey.
Students were asked what belonging meant to them, and they talked about feeling part of the university.Some students spoke of having imposter syndrome and lacking confidence.Students were also conscious of studying at an online distance learning institution and were aware of the challenges this posed in taking part in developing a sense of community, compared to students in a face-to-face university.They talked about how isolating distance learning can be -they did not have anyone at home to discuss their studies with.Students generally had had limited interaction with other students, apart from some contact at tutorials.They commented on the need for the institution to offer opportunities to "make" students feel like they belong to the university.These were all themes which were also found in the survey, reflecting the importance of interactions and interpersonal relationships as well as the need to develop sociological spaces for such interaction (Delahunty, 2014;Thomas, 2012).
Students felt that the online events offered were a good alternative to events which would be offered at face-to-face universities.They valued the opportunity of attending online events and were positive about both the guest lectures and student led coffee events.They talked about enjoying the events and felt "enriched" by them.This sounds similar to Rovai's (2002) argument that community involves a deeper emotional response than merely sharing ideas.
However not all of the students wanted peer interaction and support and chose to study online or at a distance because they are happy to work independently.For example, one student commented on "not being bothered" about student interaction.While he liked the opportunity to attend the guest lectures of interest to him, he was not concerned about coffee events and meeting other students.owens et al. (2009) suggested that some students had little interest in social interaction, being goal and assessment orientated.
Another theme was time management with students raising concerns about the risk of overload, given the other events available to them (including course tutorials and other university induction and community events).Students discussed having to choose which events they attended carefully to manage their time effectively.Students new to the university on their first law course in particular felt there was sufficient work in becoming acclimatised to distance learning without extracurricular activities; however, they wanted the opportunity to be there later on in their studies when they felt they would have more time.
Finally, the students commented on the need to have digital skills to take part in the online events and the difficulties one student experienced who had less confidence in her ability to work online.Now that the student felt more confident working online, she reflected that "its opening it all up to me".Preece (2000) included computer or technical means to communicate as one of his four pre-requisites for online community building.
There was also an interview with the academic who supported the project, and a number of themes raised by students were also evident in that interview.He highlighted again the importance of interrelationships between staff and students.He thought that the guest lectures enabled better interaction between staff and students: students could meet the academics whose work they were reading on modules, "to actually get in touch with the faces behind some of the names that they may have seen".It was also a good opportunity for the academics to "talk to the people who are the end users of what they are producing".

Discussion
Although there is much discussion in the academic literature about what it means to belong to an academic community, the students who participated in the survey and interviews were clear about what this meant to them.They identified belonging as being a sense of togetherness, supporting and learning from each other.This reflects Thomas's definition of belonging as including both psychological aspects (an internal feeling of belonging) and sociological aspects (an environment which encourages interaction with others) (2012).In their descriptions of belonging, students described the importance of reciprocal relationships with their peers and staff (as discussed by Goodenow, 1993 andAlyson et al., 2013).This include notions of connectedness, inclusion and support which are three of the four foundations of belonging described by Blake et al. (2022).
The survey suggested that the remote nature of distance learning was a barrier to building belonging, confirming the research carried out by Mulrooney and Kelly (2020).The role of the academic in initiating and sustaining contact with students was important to them and highlighted in the survey both as a barrier to belonging and a way to improve it.This has been the focus of research previously by Yoo and Huang (2013), Peacock and Cowan (2019) and Di Malta et al. (2022).
An interesting issue identified in the survey and interviews, which has not previously been highlighted in the context of belonging, was the impact of student confidence.Students considered their lack of confidence as a significant barrier to engaging with opportunities to build a sense of belonging.Whilst low self-confidence has been reported by Heaton-Shrestha et al. (2009) as a characteristic of distance learning students, it has not previously been identified as a barrier to developing a sense of community.Any intervention to improve belonging therefore needs to consider how to improve student confidence to engage.There is literature on improving student confidence in academic tasks, and it would be interesting and beneficial to carry out further research on whether this would also apply in the context of community building.
Much of the literature to date has focused on the important role of the individual academic (for example Goodenow, 1993or Peacock & Cowan, 2019) or the design of individual courses (such as Thomas et al., 2014, Abu et al., 2021or Garrad & Page, 2022).However, students were also clear that the institution has a responsibility to find ways of promoting a sense of community online.Students in the interviews referred to the need for the university to replicate the opportunities to interact with staff and students which occur more naturally face-to-face across the qualification.Any deliberate work to develop belonging online therefore needs to consider the sociological context as well as the psychological (Thomas, 2012).
As noted in the evaluation data above, some students choose to study at a distance and online as they do not wish to develop wider relationships as part of their studies, preferring to focus on their learning alone.Qualification-based activities focused on belonging and developing relationships will therefore not be taken up by all students.other students may be time poor: Rovai (2003) found that online and distance learning students are more likely to be time poor with multiple demands on their time.This emphasises the importance of offering students sufficient information to enable them to decide whether they will gain benefit from attending an event.
Some students may also face digital barriers to participation, as described by one student in their interview.It is important to acknowledge that some students will have poor digital skills or may be in digital poverty.In 2022 in the UK, 5.8 million were digitally excluded, lacking access to the internet.others had slow or unreliable internet or limited their access to the internet due to concerns about cost.Up to 10 million people in the UK lacked digital skills (Good Things Foundation, 2023).
The quantitative data offered a confusing picture, possibly due to the small number of responses to the survey.The attendance statistics suggest students valued the online events, particularly those on skills, with over 100 students attending or listening to the recording of each substantive guest lecture and over 500 engaging with each skills lecture.These skills sessions offered a greater opportunity for peer learning and support, which students reported as being an important part of belonging in the survey.This corroborates previous research highlighting the role of shared experiences with peers and staff and encouragement from others (Alyson et al., 2013;Bourdieu 1977;Goodenow, 1993).
The Belonging Index showed that students felt a greater sense of belonging to the university as a whole, followed by their individual course.However the index for a sense of belonging to the Law School was only slightly lower than the individual course, which might reflect the focus on qualification events during this project.The correlation between individual students' belonging index and the number of different types of engagement with the project showed that the greater a students' sense of belonging, the fewer types of engagement they participated in.This suggests that students who already feel a strong sense of belonging to an academic community may not feel the need to participate in qualification-based events.It was not possible to reach a clear conclusion as to the impact of the project on a student's sense of belonging based on the survey, and further research is needed into the impact of qualification events on students.We are continuing with this project in 23-24 and will carry out a larger scale evaluation at the end of the academic year.

Conclusion
As universities move to hybrid ways of providing learning, with many programmes offering online as well as face-to-face teaching, developing a sense of students belonging to our academic institutions in an online environment will become more important.It will not be possible to rely on more traditional, informal ways of developing peer communities as students will not have the same opportunity to regularly meet their peers and staff face-to-face.our project has shown that students welcome the opportunity to mix with staff and other students online across the qualification and that this has an important role to play in fostering a sense of belonging online and building communities of practice.
Whilst our evaluation was limited by the small numbers of students who participated, it suggested that qualification-based online events are of value to students as evidenced by the large numbers of students who participated in the offered events.Such opportunities provide the opportunity for students to develop relationships with their peers, and also for staff to meet and interact with a wider section of the student body.This encourages a sense of togetherness and peer support and learning.As well as the previously known barriers to developing a virtual sense of belonging, our evaluation has also highlighted the impact of low self-confidence and the importance of addressing this in any belonging work.our evaluation also identified that there are some students who chose to study online or at a distance because they want to focus solely on their learning, and do not desire any wider relationship building or community.Finally, students were clear that it is the responsibility of universities to provide opportunities for them to interact and form communities with staff and their peers, particularly for those studying online or at a distance.There is therefore a need to continue to research this area to develop increasingly effective ways of building belonging and community online.

Table 1 .
number of students attending or watching a recording of a guest lecture on substantive law 2021-23.

Table 2 .
number of students attending or watching a recording of a guest lecture on skills 2021-23.

Table 3 .
number of students attending a coffee event 2021-23.

Table 4 .
number of page views of the Law school blog 2021-23.

Table 5 .
Belonging index for different sectors of the university.

Table 6 .
correlation between belonging index and engagement.

Table 7 .
summary of answers to question seven.