Students Thrive as Partners in Virtual Learning

Abstract

<p>Despite the calls to incorporate student-staff partnership in 21st-century teaching and learning, the notion of students as partners in virtual learning remains under-studied. The present study aims to examine how undergraduate students engage as partners for co-designing and co-creating virtual learning in a newly developed positive education programme WeThrive. WeThrive is a university-wide initiative designed to equip students with a set of intellectual, intrapersonal, and interpersonal capabilities for nurturing student positive strengths and whole-person development. Student partners actively engaged in multiple carefully designed pedagogical activities in WeThrive, such as role play, virtual gallery, online collaborative learning, and online student tutoring. Results from quantitative and qualitative investigations showed that students as partners were effective in knowledge co-creation under the virtual learning environment. Taking the virtual gallery as an example, it has been shown to serve as an immersive space for fostering students’ engagement and reflective learning. Additionally, the online student tutoring process enhanced student partners’ knowledge comprehension and their cognitive, emotional, and social skillsets, such as leadership, creativity, emotional resilience, and communication skills. As to the practical implications of the study for teaching and learning, evidence-based insights are provided on the effective approaches to nurturing student partnerships online. As the Covid-19 pandemic has encouraged a variety of creative learning activities to be put forward in the virtual space, our study pioneered an innovative student-staff partnership practice and provided a meaningful example for educators and researchers to engage student partners cognitively, emotionally, and behaviourally in the virtual teaching and learning environment.<br></p>