Community Doesn't Happen by Accident

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One of the things I have learned from leading online graduate programs is that students can value flexibility and still deeply crave connection.

Those two things are not contradictory.

Students choose online education for many reasons. They may be working full-time, raising families, living hundreds or thousands of miles from campus, or trying to fit graduate education into an already complicated life. Online programs give them access and flexibility that a traditional residential program may not.

But flexibility does not mean students want to learn alone.

In fact, one of the things we hear repeatedly from students in our online graduate programs at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications is that they want more opportunities to connect. They want to know their classmates. They want relationships with faculty. They want to feel that they are part of something rather than simply completing a sequence of courses.

I have seen that in my own teaching.

Most of the courses in our programs are asynchronous, but one of the classes I teach includes a required weekly synchronous meeting. At the end of a recent semester, one student wrote on LinkedIn:

“A special shout-out to Evan Kropp for making this my most engaging semester yet. Having the opportunity to meet weekly and connect in real time made the class such an insightful and memorable part of my graduate experience.”

She was talking about a class, but I think she was also talking about community.

There was value in seeing the same people each week. There was value in conversation that happened in real time. There was value in becoming familiar with one another rather than simply encountering names attached to discussion posts.

This semester, we are taking that idea further. The online graduate programs I lead are holding our first in-person gathering for students, called Beyond the Screen. Students will come together for an evening and the following day to meet one another, spend time with faculty, network, learn, and build relationships.

The academic programming matters, of course.

But I suspect some of the most valuable moments will happen between the scheduled activities.

They will happen over dinner. During a break. When two students realize they work in similar fields. When someone finally meets a professor they have known only through a computer screen. When a conversation that begins casually turns into a professional relationship or friendship.

Those moments are difficult to measure, but they matter.

And this need for community extends far beyond higher education.

Near where I live in New Hampshire, a local podcast called Seacoast Stories tells stories about the people, businesses, and issues shaping the region. But it has increasingly moved beyond simply producing a podcast. It holds live events and organizes a monthly Dinner Club where community members come together around a table.

Its website captures the idea beautifully: the goal is to turn an audience into neighbors. The organization says about one in three Dinner Club seats is now occupied by someone returning for another dinner.

Across the Atlantic, Pint of Science uses another variation on the same idea. Scientists and researchers leave universities and laboratories and meet members of the public in pubs, cafés, and other informal spaces to talk about their work. What began in the United Kingdom has grown into an international festival spanning hundreds of cities.

A graduate program. A neighborhood dinner. Scientists talking in a pub.

They look very different, but all three are responding to something fundamentally human: people want opportunities to be with other people.

There is evidence that the need is substantial. Gallup research across 142 countries found that 24 percent of people described themselves as very or fairly lonely. Younger adults reported greater loneliness than adults 65 and older.

Within higher education, a recent meta-analysis drawing on tens of thousands of students found a substantial relationship between loneliness and a lower sense of belonging.

But loneliness is not simply a matter of being physically alone.

A student can sit in a lecture hall surrounded by hundreds of people and feel invisible. An online student living 1,000 miles from campus can feel deeply connected to classmates and professors.

Community is not created by proximity alone.

It comes from being known.

It comes from repeated interaction. From shared experiences. From knowing that there are people who notice when you are present and perhaps notice when you are missing.

Community also creates something that increasingly efficient systems tend to eliminate: serendipity.

We have become exceptionally good at designing experiences that allow people to accomplish things quickly. Log in. Complete the transaction. Watch the video. Submit the assignment. Join the meeting. Leave the meeting.

Efficiency has enormous value.

But sometimes the inefficient parts of life are where relationships form.

The conversation after the meeting. The person sitting next to you at dinner. The five minutes before class begins. The unexpected discussion that has nothing to do with the agenda.

Those moments are difficult to engineer, but leaders can create more opportunities for them to occur.

That may be an increasingly important responsibility of leadership.

We cannot manufacture friendships. We cannot force people to feel connected. And putting people in the same room does not magically create community.

But we can create the conditions in which community is more likely to develop.

We can create smaller groups where people actually learn one another’s names.

We can build repeated opportunities for interaction rather than relying on one large annual event.

We can create shared experiences around meals, learning, projects, celebrations, traditions, or common interests.

We can give people reasons to talk to someone they do not already know.

And sometimes we can simply provide the space and time for people to linger.

In higher education, particularly online education, this requires intentionality. We should think about community as deliberately as we think about curriculum, technology, assessment, and student services.

But the same question applies to workplaces, neighborhoods, professional organizations, churches, civic groups, and almost every organization we lead.

We spend a great deal of time asking how we can make experiences easier, faster, more convenient, and more personalized.

Those are worthwhile goals.

Maybe we also need to ask another question:

Where, in what we are building, will people find one another?

Because community matters.

And community doesn’t happen by accident.