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Zhou, X and Wolstencroft, P (2022) A home away from home: building an organic online support community for Chinese students using WeChat. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (24).
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A home away from home Building an organic online support community for Chinese students using WeChat.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (547kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Traditional university support structures have generally been predicated on a ‘one size fits all’ approach that stresses a mechanistic, bureaucratic approach. Support is transactional in nature with students accessing it only when needed. Support focuses on both individual tutorial and centralised mechanisms which have proved effective for only some students. This paper proposes an organic student support system that is based around five features: agility in the environment, a tutor-student partnership, informal two-way communication, a student-led community, the inclusion of a knowledge-hub. The student support system in this article is based around Chinese students at a large UK university who felt disenfranchised by the current support mechanisms, so an alternative model was set up using the group-based instant-messaging social media platform, WeChat. The findings of surveys and interviews with Chinese students demonstrated that the featured organic student support system proved extremely successful and is something that could be replicated with other groups of students in the future in UK higher education.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HE Transportation and Communications L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education T Technology > T Technology (General) |
| Divisions: | Business & Management (from Sep 19) |
| Publisher: | Association for Learning Development in Higher Education |
| SWORD Depositor: | A Symplectic |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Sep 2022 09:58 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Sep 2022 10:00 |
| DOI or ID number: | 10.47408/jldhe.vi24.853 |
| URI: | https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/17525 |
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