Hybrid community spaces work better when students co-design them

By Student Voice AI

Updated May 14, 2026

A Teams channel is not a community, and a survey result is not belonging. We see that gap repeatedly in student voice work: universities add more channels, but students still describe feeling peripheral to their course. That is why Aurelie Le Normand and Barbara Waters' Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal paper, "Amplifying Student Voice in the Creation of a Hybrid Community Space", matters. Using a Fashion Business and Technology cohort at the University of Manchester, the case study asks what changes when student voice is used not only to collect opinion, but to co-design the spaces where belonging is built.

Context and research question

The paper starts from a recognisable post-pandemic problem. Blended learning had reduced time on campus, cost-of-living pressures made attendance harder for some students, and a move to a new building had removed some of the discipline-specific spaces that used to support informal contact. Traditional mechanisms were still in place, but NSS feedback and Student Voice Committee discussion were already signalling a lack of connection and a weaker sense of belonging.

This is a practice-based case study centred on around 500 undergraduate students in Fashion Business and Technology at a Russell Group university. The intervention combined an online Microsoft Teams community, launched in September 2023, with four timetabled on-campus social events each year. Students helped shape the activities, and the authors evaluated the approach through Teams usage data, a Microsoft Forms poll at the end of the first semester, and thematic analysis of anecdotal student feedback. That makes the paper useful for UK higher education teams, but it also means the evidence should be read as implementation learning rather than a sector-wide causal test.

Key findings

The first finding is that existing feedback channels were good at surfacing the problem, but weak at solving it on their own. Students were already saying they felt disconnected and wanted more opportunities to build community. The intervention therefore did not replace student voice mechanisms. It used them to design a more practical response.

The hybrid model worked better than a digital-only fix. In the first 90 days up to 10 February 2025, the Teams space recorded 122 active users across 11 active channels. In the small poll sample, 69% of respondents said they had accessed the space and found its content useful, while 67% said they checked it at least weekly. The authors also report that all respondents felt connected to their year group or the wider Fashion Business and Technology community. Just as important, the physical socials were timetabled rather than left as optional extras at the edge of university life. That matters because the paper reinforces a wider point from recent work on post-pandemic flexibility and belonging: convenience and connection are not the same thing.

Co-created activities gained traction when they felt purposeful, not merely social. Students helped shape events such as alumni networking, clothes swaps, activism-led design work, and card-making for hospitalised children. The paper suggests these activities worked partly because they reflected students' interests and values, rather than assuming everyone wanted generic mixers.

"Doing something more meaningful than just socialise."

The reported benefits extended beyond attendance. Student feedback pointed to wider friendship networks, better interaction with lecturers, stronger feelings of belonging, positive effects on wellbeing, and useful contact across year groups. One student said the initiatives had helped them feel more part of both a student community and the wider university. For Student Experience teams, that is important because it suggests hybrid community design can influence the tone of staff-student relationships as well as peer connection.

The paper is also clear about its limits. Participation was uneven across years, with first-year students engaging more readily than later cohorts. Some students did not find Teams intuitive or necessary, and the authors note that asynchronous online spaces still limit spontaneous interaction. They also warn that scaling the model across a whole university would require local adaptation by discipline, cohort, and resource base.

Practical implications

For UK universities, the first implication is to treat belonging as a design problem, not only a measurement problem. If students say they feel disconnected, the answer is not always another survey round. It may be a timetable, building, communication, or course-community issue. Hybrid community spaces can help, but only when they are designed into the student experience rather than bolted on afterwards. The benefit is earlier intervention before disconnection hardens into lower engagement or weaker continuation.

Second, universities should use open-text feedback to separate access from connection. A digital hub may be easy to launch, but that does not show whether students find it useful, welcoming, or socially meaningful. Add prompts that ask what helps students feel part of their course, which hybrid spaces they actually use, and what still feels missing. A repeatable process such as our NSS open-text analysis methodology helps teams compare those comments across cohorts and timepoints without relying on anecdote. That is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally: it helps institutions organise recurring themes in belonging and community feedback at scale.

Third, universities should co-design activities with different cohorts rather than assume one format fits all. This paper shows that later-year students often want clearer academic, professional, or networking value from extra activity. If institutions only design for first-year enthusiasm, they will misread what later cohorts actually need. The benefit is more relevant engagement and less wasted effort.

Finally, teams should close the loop visibly on what students say about community spaces. If students suggest changes to communication channels, event formats, or staff presence, they need to see what changed and what did not. Otherwise, the space quickly becomes another symbolic listening exercise. That logic is no different from the wider case for closing the loop on student voice initiatives. The benefit is stronger trust in both the activity itself and the wider student voice process.

FAQ

Q: How should a university test a hybrid community model without building a large new platform first?

A: Start small at subject or school level. Create one shared digital space for course communication and peer interaction, then pair it with a few timetabled, student-designed activities during existing contact periods. Ask short open-text questions afterwards about belonging, usefulness, and what still feels missing. That is usually enough to show whether the model is building community or just adding noise.

Q: What are the methodological limits of this paper?

A: It is a practice-based case study from one discipline area at one university. The evidence includes usage data, a very small poll sample, and thematic reading of anecdotal student feedback. That makes it valuable as an implementation example, especially for UK teams, but not as proof that the same model will work everywhere without adjustment.

Q: What does this change about student voice more broadly?

A: It suggests student voice is more useful when it helps universities design the conditions for belonging, not only report on them afterwards. Surveys, committees, digital spaces, and in-person activity do different jobs. Institutions get better evidence, and better outcomes, when those routes are connected and when students can see how their feedback reshapes the experience.

References

[Paper Source]: Aurelie Le Normand and Barbara Waters "Amplifying Student Voice in the Creation of a Hybrid Community Space" DOI: 10.66561/sehej.v7i1.1403

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