Developing effective and sustainable student-led collaborative learning communities within and across higher education institutions

We have been working with students to co-create effective and sustainable student-led collaborative learning (CL) communities, which typically take the form of small group peer-meetings, near-peer-led teaching sessions and/or participation in online forums. The most effective communities included all three approaches. To explore students’ opinions of existing (physical and online) CL communities and to generate ideas for novel approaches, various student-led focus groups were conducted with undergraduate and postgraduate students. Qualitative analysis demonstrated strong preferences for social learning, a desire for students to ‘own’ the communities, and a need for structured activities and academic guidance to provide direction and focus.