Belonging in online postgraduate learning takes more than access, study finds

Postgraduate health professions learners studying online in Pakistan say that a sense of belonging emerges only through ongoing interaction with people and with the conditions that allow participation, not simply from being enrolled in a programme. The finding comes from a qualitative multi-site case study published in BMC Medical Education, in which researchers interviewed forty learners across four medical universities that offer postgraduate health professions education through online distance learning. Each university was treated as a distinct case so that the analysis could capture both patterns shared across institutions and experiences specific to individual sites.

The researchers, Brekhna Jamil Khan, Susie Schofield and Mandy Moffat, conducted semi-structured online interviews and analysed the transcripts using reflexive thematic analysis, paying attention to shared and divergent experiences across the four sites. When learners described what belonging meant to them, four recurring elements appeared: emotional connection, ownership, interpersonal affiliation and psychological safety. These four components formed the core of how participants understood the concept, and they anchored the integrated conceptual framework the team built from the findings.

Six interconnected themes explained how belonging developed or weakened in the online environment. Three of them concerned relational experiences. Learners described building community through shared experiences, being recognised, heard and valued, and feeling safe, supported and included. The remaining three themes concerned the conditions that shaped participation and connection: balancing flexibility and participation, technology acting as both a bridge and a barrier to belonging, and fostering connection through responsive presence. In other words, belonging depended not only on how learners related to peers and educators, but also on how the programme’s design and technical environment enabled or constrained those relationships.

One of the study’s clearest messages is that access to an online programme did not, by itself, produce a sense of membership. Learners could be formally admitted and technically connected yet still feel outside the learning community. The accounts showed that belonging was shaped through continuing interactions among learners, other people, and the conditions that enabled participation, which means institutions cannot assume that enrolment and connectivity translate into engagement.

The proposed framework makes an important distinction. It separates how learners understood belonging from the relational experiences and contextual conditions through which they encountered it. This separation matters for programme design, because it suggests that fostering belonging in online distance learning requires attention both to interpersonal dynamics, such as recognition and psychological safety, and to structural factors, such as how flexibility is balanced against participation and how technology is deployed.

The authors are careful about the limits of what the study can claim. The framework’s suggested links to longer-term learner outcomes require further study, and the findings describe how these forty postgraduate learners in Pakistani medical universities understood and experienced belonging rather than measuring effects on completion, performance or wellbeing. As a qualitative multi-site case study, the work offers explanatory depth about learners’ accounts rather than statistical generalisation across all online distance learning contexts. Nevertheless, for institutions delivering postgraduate health professions education online, the study indicates that a sense of belonging may support participation and engagement, and that cultivating it demands deliberate attention to community, recognition, safety, flexibility and technology, rather than treating online access as sufficient on its own.

Subject of Research: Sense of belonging among postgraduate online distance learners in health professions education

Article Title: How do postgraduate online distance learners understand ‘sense of belonging’ and why it matters: a qualitative study

Article References: Khan, B. J., Schofield, S., & Moffat, M. (2026). How do postgraduate online distance learners understand ‘sense of belonging’ and why it matters: a qualitative study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10703-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10703-y

Keywords: online distance learning, sense of belonging, postgraduate education, health professions education, qualitative research, medical education, Pakistan, thematic analysis, psychological safety, online learning communities, postgraduate, online