University of Dundee

Masters in Medical Education

This case study is from a completely online postgraduate programme for healthcare professionals who may be based anywhere in the world. Key to creating a sense of belonging on this programme has been creating clear student cohorts so that students move through a module together, and the use of small group exercises to allow the sharing of personal experiences and stories that are key to establishing a relationship of trust between students and staff.

Contributor: Dr Susie Schofield



4. Sense of belonging

The change to the programme in 2016 restricting students to one of three entry points was motivated in part to increase the sense of belonging for both students and our part-time tutors who are also off-campus. Students have a strong sense of belonging to the health professions, so this helps the sense of comradeship on the course. However, they are also developing a sense of belonging to the educational field. 

Online discussions are key to creating a sense of belonging, and finding the right size of group for creating fruitful discussion has taken trial and error.  There are many international students on the programme and we had initially struggled with making the content relevant to everyone, but actually students share practice from their own settings and this can lead to rich discussion (e.g. differences in copyright law). This links the students up even though they are a disparate group. Students are not, however, forced to participate in online discussions, and some never do. If a student has not engaged in the VLE for three weeks then they are sent a supportive email just to check that they are not struggling. We are currently reviewing whether we should do this also with those who don’t engage in the discussion boards. 

A dialogic approach is taken to assessment and feedback in that students are expected to reflect on feedback from their assessment, and respond to the marker with any comments, and plans for development. We plan to extend this use of feedback dialogue from tutor-student to student-student. The dialogic approach is further supported by the use of Turnitin which is open to students, and which they are encouraged to use as a self-development tool. Most modules have one tutor-marked formative assessment, but other assessments are computer-, peer- and self-assessed.  

Synchronous activities (e.g. collaborative classroom) have not been successful due to difficulties in finding appropriate times for students to come together online: the working patterns of medical professionals and differences in timezones make it virtually impossible! However, alternative asynchronous activities have proved to be just as engaging. For example, after unsuccessful attempts to run synchronous question and answer sessions with expert speakers, Padlet was used so students were able to pose questions to the speaker. The module lead themed the questions to guide a recorded interview with the expert. This was then posted to the VLE.