Student insights: experiencing ‘community’ at uni
Co-authored with Prof Steven Warburton, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education Innovation), University of Newcastle
‘Belonging’ has become one of higher education's most discussed concepts, and for good reason: research consistently links a strong sense of belonging to higher student motivation, academic confidence, engagement, and achievement. It has been recognised as crucial for equity, and since 2023 has had a dedicated place in the QILT Student Experience Survey, with longitudinal SES data suggesting that overall educational experience, connection with peers outside of class, and feeling supported to settle are key predictors of whether students feel they belong. But if belonging matters as much as the evidence suggests, are we designing for it, or just hoping it happens on its own?
We chose to use a qualitative research project to take a fresh look at these ideas through a ‘communities’ lens - the groups, networks, cohorts and spaces that students might feel they belong to during the course of their studies. Guided by the question ‘How can we support student networks and learning communities across different study modes and learner preferences?’, the research explored how students currently engage in communities; perceived impacts when community works well (or is absent); and what students expect from their university, educators, and each other when it comes to building connection and belonging.
We invited students across disciplines, campuses, and life stages to be part of a series of discussions, and we share some key findings below. Together, they challenge some common assumptions about university community, illuminate how institutional systems can undermine belonging, and point to a need for more intentional approaches to learning design and student support.
1. There is no ‘core’ university community
Despite what we might like to think, or remember through rose-tinted specs from our own university experiences, most students do not experience their university as a unified community. Instead, students described a series of smaller, often disconnected worlds, shaped by which campus they attend (if they do), what stage of study they're in, which discipline they study, and who they happen to sit near in a tutorial.
These multiple communities are not necessarily a failure of student engagement, but simply how the experiences of a diverse student body work in practice. Connection happens in labs, project groups, placement cohorts, and educator relationships, rather than at a whole-of-university level. Designing for community means facilitating connections where people naturally come together, not offering a top-down, institutional identity to ‘belong’ to.
2. Communities need to keep the equity door open
Students from equity groups described their relationship to university community in ways that revealed a desire for connection, but also frequent barriers to it. Sometimes, awareness was the issue: one second-year Psychology student in our discussions suspected a disability community existed somewhere at the university, but had never managed to connect with it. In other cases, our research found that opportunities to participate were known, but access to those opportunities was challenging. Sometimes getting to an on-campus event carries costs in transport, time, or energy that some students can’t afford, so the invitation to connect inadvertently exacerbates exclusion. Communities built around equity needs can be wonderful, but someone needs to make sure the door is held open and alternative entry points made available.
3. Your systems are interrupting our connections
Students described community as something that depends on rhythm, routine, and predictability to take root. When our institutions disrupt that rhythm, the consequences ripple out in ways that are rarely visible to the people making operational decisions.
A 4th-year Occupational Therapy student captured this with real feeling: last-minute timetable changes meant rescheduling children's appointments, her own medical needs, and everything else she had carefully arranged around her study commitments. From an administrative perspective, a timetable adjustment may be just a logistical matter, but for her, it was a small crisis that made life harder that month.
Students with caring responsibilities, health conditions, or shift-based work have built fragile but functional ecosystems around their study schedule. When we switch rooms, reschedule tutorials or restructure placements without adequate notice, we’re asking students to work around the system, but offer little flexibility in return. If community is about relationships, this one seems particularly one-sided.
4. Community as a practical and emotional support
When students described the benefits of connection, they spoke across a spectrum of emotional and practical impacts. Both matter, and separating them misrepresents the reality of learning.
On the emotional side, students described staying motivated through difficult periods, having someone to study alongside when things felt hard, and feeling less alone in navigating the demands of a degree. On the practical side, they described using their networks to find information, share resources, decode assessment requirements, and alert each other to deadlines. One 3rd-year Radiation Therapy student recalled how much discussion boards and conversations with classmates helped when assignment rubrics weren't clear about what was actually expected - whilst we might hope our instructions are always clear, the crowd helps out when issues arise.
This blending of social and cognitive function is well supported in the learning literature, but it is worth acknowledging that when students lack connection, they don't just feel lonely. They are also less informed, less resourced, and less likely to persist.
5. Learning networks don’t stop at the campus gates
One of the more striking findings of the research was the porous boundary between university community and the rest of students' lives. When students were asked to map their study networks, they didn't draw a circle around their cohort. They drew an extended web that included partners, parents, siblings, friends, employers, GPs, and even a newborn baby (bet that wasn’t on your ‘student support’ list!).
This has implications for how universities think about student support and community. The partner who works extra hours so a student can study full-time is part of that student's learning ecosystem. The friend who serves as a practice audience before a high-stakes presentation is contributing to learning outcomes. We need to recognise this extended network and design for students who are embedded in complex lives rather than isolated in a perfectly protected study bubble.
6. Community ebbs and flows, forms and re-forms
University study unfolds over time, and so does the experience of community within it. Students described their sense of connection as something that shifts as they move through different stages of a degree, from the tentative formation of early friendships, through the relentless rhythms of mid-degree grind, to the disruption and reorientation that often accompanies placements, online-only semesters, or the transition into final year.
A 4th-year medical student captured a feeling echoed by several students: the strangeness of being at an "odd transition point," moving from a predominantly in-class experience to full-time placement, and feeling the community she'd built suddenly disappear. Others found new professional networks and communities in well-managed placements where their university coordinator had made efforts to support and facilitate connection, showing that a little thought goes a long way in what can be a difficult transition.
7. There is no ‘better’: online and in-person both count
The research resisted any simple conclusion about whether in-person or online learning is better for community. Students' needs and preferences were diverse, and the meaningful finding was not about modality but about design within modality.
For students who lived at a distance from campus, had health conditions, or carried caring responsibilities, digital spaces were not a compromise, but an enabler. When online learning was well-designed, it allowed meaningful participation that would otherwise have been impossible. A 3rd-year student described relying heavily on online systems because of health issues following a significant injury, and finding them genuinely effective - he could not have continued his studies without these options.
For other students, being physically present with others was the point. Several mentioned ‘body doubling’ - the practice of studying alongside others simply for the focus and accountability that shared physical space provides, even when those others aren't studying the same subject or even studying at all. The common thread across both preferences was intentional design: the spaces, physical or digital, need to actually work for the people using them.
8. Don’t leave community to chance - design it in
Students described the value of collaborative activities like labs, interactive discussions, project work, and problem-based learning, not just because they are more engaging, but because they create the conditions for the kinds of connections that sustain students through difficulty. Conversely, when learning environments are designed without attention to connection, students miss out on both the social and the cognitive benefits that come from learning alongside others.
Whilst many students are happy to initiate connection and organic communities do spring up, it is neither reliable nor equitable to depend on this casual emergence. We don’t have to direct every group and attend every gathering, but we do need to make sure students know where the people are, facilitate introductions, and lead by example. If we’re not connecting with them, then why should they connect at all?
Some final thoughts to consider:
Universities can’t create meaningful community at scale, but they can design the micro-conditions in curriculum, timetabling, support services, and learning spaces that allow community to form and maintain itself. This requires attention not to the grand narrative of campus culture, but to the granular experience of a student in a particular cohort, on a particular campus, at a particular stage of their degree.
Equity is not a separate agenda from community. Access to the conditions that enable belonging is itself unequally distributed, and policies that look inclusive on paper can function as barriers in practice. Designing for community means designing with the most constrained student in mind, and working from there.
The timing and management of transitions, particularly into placement, deserves more attention. These are moments when community is disrupted and often not rebuilt, and students are vulnerable to isolation at exactly the point when connection to peers and educators could be most valuable.
And finally: good learning design is also community design. When educators include collaborative activities, create predictable and responsive environments, give clear guidance, and build trust through consistency, they’re not just improving learning outcomes, they’re creating the conditions in which students can build networks, support each other, and get to the other side with more than just a degree certificate in their hands.
This article was prepared to support a HERDSA conference roundtable discussion in July 2026: ‘Student community as learning infrastructure: What should we design for, and why?’. Insights are synthesised from qualitative research conducted with students at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Student insights have been used with permission.