Towards forming learning communities - Understanding the role of collaborative work in an undergraduate engineering program

Learning communities may form in the engineering undergraduate programmes through meaningful teamwork activities and positive experiences working with peers. This research study was conducted as part of a programme evaluation to understand how students conceptualised the purpose of a learning community. Through a thematic analysis of six focus groups with students, we have a better understanding of how students find value in maintaining relationships with their peers that they may have worked within team-based work. Each focus group consisted of students studying at the same level of the undergraduate programme – ranging from first-year students to recently graduated students. We synthesized data from these groups to guide inferences about why and how students formed communities with their peers, the motivations to maintain those communities, and any curricular interventions that fostered the sense of community. The findings of this study allow us to understand how a learning community pedagogy can be integrated into the broader engineering curriculum to provide undergraduate engineering students with meaningful and coherent learning experiences.