Together in electric dreams: Inventing an online asynchronous Community of Practice for Learning Developers working with health students

Abstract

The creation of a virtual community of practice (vCOP) is a way to bring Learning Developers in different institutions together to create opportunities for collaboration and a sense of community which may help educators to overcome a sense of isolation as well as limited time and resources (Yarris et al., 2019). The development of LDHealthCOP (Learning Developers Health Community of Practice) unintentionally aligned with Wenger’s (2000) social definition of learning and three modes of belonging: engagement, imagination, and alignment. The group formed to explore how to improve Learning Development (LD) practice for Health students at our institutions. Students on health programmes are often from ‘under-represented’ and ‘non-traditional’ groups which pose particular challenges. It has a crowd sourced co-created programme of monthly talks and activities where practitioners pose each other topic questions to enable discussion and share ideas or resources. Using technology to gather together and ‘connect over their craft’ (Yarris et al., 2019) enables members to transcend the boundaries of space and time allowing members to ‘meet’ when and where they are, creating a unique sense of flexibility (Knapp, 1998 cited in Valenti and Sutton, 2020).

This session shared how the vCOP has been developed, linking theory with practice to address the specific challenges faced by Health Care students.  The following themes were covered at the session:

• Areas of exploration or challenge for a Health and Social Care vCOP.
• Methods of engagement with the vCOP, including demonstration of collaborative Padlet resources.
• Reflection on the benefits and pitfalls of sharing knowledge and experience asynchronously.
• Participants gained an insight into the workings of a vCOP which may inspire them to: join us, join another ALDinHE community of practice or create their own.