Online studies – Building a path to the sense of belonging to a community
In today’s constantly developing digital landscape it is crucial for individuals as well as educational institutions to develop their processes and skills to adapt to these digital changes. A global pandemic made it visible that everyone has to be able to adjust their work methods, tools and behaviour to be appropriately equipped to operate in rapidly evolving surroundings. A functional online learning environment and online study programs are a great assets both to the learners and to the higher educational institutions as well.
Online learning environment enables flexibility to conduct studies at learner’s preferred pace and a possibility simultaneously to participate a multiple degree program studies in different educational institutions. The downside of the flexibility is the fact that online learning environment creates a space where students may never meet each other or their teachers face to face in the same physical location, and therefore, when designing online studies one of the key factors, alongside a meaningful learning experience and an inspirational content, is to consider truly the people who are going to participate into the studies.
I started my studies in Master of Business Administration Service Design in 2023. These studies were hybrid studies, which enabled participation regardless of location, even from abroad. At that point I was living in Berlin in Germany, and obviously I would not be able to attend to classes on campus in Turku Finland on a regular basis, therefore hybrid studies were a perfect fit. Nevertheless, participation required motivation and a sense of purpose to travel all the way from central Europe to western coast of Finland. The travel was totally worth it, because the participation developed my sense of belonging to a community. This also inspired me to do my master’s thesis about online studies and how service design could support the designing process.
Points for building a solid online study community
The results of the thesis study were that every learner has their own learning needs, learning strategies, time management and communication skills, motivation, inspiration and concentration capacity. On campus studies teacher has a possibility to observe students and their behaviour and learning strategies in real time, but in online learning environment teacher may not see the students at all, for example, if cameras are not kept open during a virtual class. Without saying this goes to the other direction as well, students may not be able to form a complete reflection of their teacher, and teacher’s personality and their teaching style based on what they see on a small computer screen. When designing online studies, the moment in the beginning of studies should be planned with consideration and clear intention. Teacher can be seen as a group leader who has an ability to lead by example and start building a community in the beginning when a new group starts their degree program studies. The beginning sets a direction to the entire online study program.
- Facilitate the student grouping in the beginning of the studies to enhance learners’ feeling of belonging to a community
- Build trust through clear rules for virtual class participation (no cooking, no driving at the same time, keep cameras open) to enhance participation during virtual class, online setting may be difficult for some learners to operate
Working together as a community and learning from others
After successful grouping in the beginning, can learning from peer students and sharing own expertise start. Groupwork is based on educating students to work in multicultural groups and is used at universities of applied sciences. Working as a group can teach learners, among other things, resilience, communication skills and keeping up with deadlines. Starting the groupwork can be challenging when organizing schedules and platforms where to conduct the work. In online learning environment this can be extra challenging when all communication needs to be organised through digital devices. Therefore, when designing online studies, groupwork should be supported in a way that no unnecessary time is used to form the groups. Occasionally the time with the group is used to learn how to communicate with other students rather than learning from the topic and the learning task at hand. Again, teacher’s leadership and expertise can be used to facilitate discussions to get to know each other better and learn from others’ interests and working methods prior to the actual work.
- Create home groups to support fast assignment start, and rotate the groups after a while, to enable learners to get to know the other learners as well
- Add more facilitated discussions to create possibilities to share expertise and learn from others diverse backgrounds
Development for a functional online learning platform
Online studies require a functional online learning platform. It is a challenging task to recognize all of the different individual needs that learners have for their learning. On top of that teachers should recognize also the digital competences students have and in which capacity those skills support or prevent learning from the actual learning content.
All information teachers collect are from the written assignments, virtual class participation, groupwork presentations and depending on teacher’s own inspiration and imagination of how they utilize digital tools to create captivating learning assignments. It is expected to have some digital skills when learners participate into online studies, but there can still occur difficulties, if there is a need to learn quickly and multiple digital tools simultaneously. Each teacher has their own way of utilizing the online platform, which they find comfortable to use themselves. Students can attend to other courses outside of their own degree program and just to find out that another teacher or degree program uses the platform completely differently. This can cause cognitive overload and difficulties to keep up with the learning tasks, when the time is used to understand the usage of an online tool rather than focus on the content of the course topic itself.
- Be part of developing a routine for how to utilize ItsLearning, this reduces learners cognitive overload, when teachers use the common guideline
- Take individual needs into consideration, and offer variety of different types of materials and online coaching
- Pre-formulated feedback of each assignment, and thoughtful improvement suggestions already during the course
Continuous learning
Whether they are online studies or campus studies, I cannot imagine that it would be an easy task to design studies, because sometimes conducting my own studies required designing time schedules, travel itineraries and motivational speeches. My goal is to develop my career path, and the learning comes alive when discoveries are put into practice, but as well as with discussions with others. The need to belong to a group does not change in any age, not even as a master student, and therefore it is important not to forget it when designing online studies.
This article is based on a thesis, which is uploaded on Theseus
Heikkinen, M. (2026). Designing Online Studies through Service Design – User Experience of a Master Student. Master’s Thesis. Turku University of Applied Sciences.
Picture: Microsoft. (2026). Copilot (GPT-4) [Large Language Model]. https://copilot.microsoft.com/