Enhancing the student experience through sustainable Communities of Practice

Introduction: The switch to online off-campus teaching for universities worldwide due COVID-19 will transform into more sustainable and predictable delivery models where virtual local student contact continue be combined. Institutions must do replace the full experience benefits of learners educators being together. Methods: Our centre has been delivering distance blended learning than 40 years over 4000 alumni across five continents. students come from varied healthcare disciplines are at different stages their career as practitioners. Whilst studying on programme work together flexibly in randomly arranged peer groups designed allow establishment Communities Practice (CoP) through use Discussion Boards. Results: We found Boards encouraged reflection learning, sharing ideas with peers tutors, reduce anxiety, support progression, enable benchmarking. This led a highly effective sense belonging each other, our educators, wider University, many highlighting an excellent maintaining thriving CoP within body. Conclusion: Despite based one large postgraduate medical education, approach is relevant any undergraduate programme, particularly those that lead professional qualification. With mix nationalities, we can ‘model way’ enabling strong CoP’s share about best practice network which shared international community.