Shifting From Access to Belonging in an Online Hybrid Program

As online education rapidly gains momentum, schools face a unique challenge: how can we foster an environment of true belonging in a virtual space? At Aoba-Japan International School (AJIS), our senior school offers three programs: a Grade 10 International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Program, and in Grades 11 and 12, both the IB Diploma Program and our school-based Global Leadership Diploma. Currently, fully online students are participating remotely in all three programs. For the IB Diploma Program, we are one of seven schools piloting a full online delivery, the only one using a hybrid model. This is an intense period of learning for us all.

In our third year of delivering a hybrid model and halfway through our first year in the online IB Diploma Program pilot, we’ve recognized the need to reframe our guiding questions. As online students join on-campus classes remotely, the focus has shifted from simply providing access to fostering a true sense of belonging. Online students have commented that they sometimes feel like observers or peripheral participants, and this feeling of distance is not restricted to the classroom. It is no longer enough to ensure students can participate; they must feel like full, valued members of the learning community. They must feel like they belong.

Access as a Foundation, Not a Destination

Historically, access has been the cornerstone of online education, enabling students to engage with academic programs regardless of their location. My own experience with distance education in 1997 highlights this evolution. Enrolled in a master’s program through Australia’s University of New England while living in Japan, I relied on postal exchanges that took weeks. Relationship building with classmates or faculty was never an option. Today’s multi-modal, real-time exchanges are transformative by comparison, yet the questions we pose and the challenges we identify are still catching up to our rapidly expanding technological capacities.

Ensuring access has always been a foundational priority in online programs, especially underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic, where we all attempted to minimize disruption to student learning which in many cases involved online access. When pandemic restrictions were lifted, AJIS chose to expand remote access rather than return to fully on-campus learning. As part of this, we initiated Remote Tuesdays, when on-campus students could attend remotely, and about a third of students did so. This benefited students with long commutes and allowed teachers to develop their online teaching skills.

In our first year, various technological solutions were developed, including a dedicated Google Meet screen with a tracking camera, a shared Google Calendar with automatic links, and lapel microphones for clearer audio. While these measures provided access, engagement levels of many of the on-campus students participating in the Remote Tuesday were noticeably lower in a remote context. Technical issues, like statistically improbable numbers of students claiming camera and audio malfunctions as reasons for unresponsiveness, reminded us that access alone doesn’t guarantee active participation. We remember those days.

From Online Access to Authentic Engagement

One of the insights from our two-year Remote Tuesday project was that access does not automatically translate to engagement, as online students’ needs often differ from those of on-campus students. Attempting to mirror the on-campus experience online isn’t always practical. We eventually discontinued the once-a-week remote option for on-campus students to focus on improving the experience for fully online students. While innovations in access, like virtual avatar-based spaces, remain an area of interest, our primary aim has shifted toward building a sense of belonging through connection and relationship development.

For instance, our senior school includes mixed-grade advisory groups that meet twice daily, and advisory teachers play a central role in supporting students’ school experiences. Initially, we distributed online students across various advisory groups, aiming to provide an authentic experience. However, we soon realized that online students formed more meaningful connections in a dedicated online advisory group. This group has proven invaluable in identifying some of the unique needs and questions of our online students. Other events, such as college fairs, field trips, and service activities, are also being re-evaluated to support authentic engagement.

Building Belonging Through Connection

Building relationships is fundamental to fostering a sense of belonging, which underpins student wellbeing. For online students, incidental, face-to-face interactions that happen naturally in physical classrooms are limited. Online interactions often occur on-screen, with online students often unsure of the audience. This setup restricts opportunities for casual interaction, making it easy for online students to feel like outsiders rather than integral parts of the school community.

Our current focus is on designing interactions that foster these spontaneous moments online. Based on feedback from our online students, we’ve developed pedagogical agreements to support online students in each class. One approach, for instance, involves pairing online students with small groups of on-campus peers in Google Meet breakouts in every class. This arrangement takes them off the “big screen,” creating a more intimate, small group setting that facilitates natural, incidental interactions.

Our goal is simple, to provide more opportunities for connection, one interaction at a time, and in doing so, support our online students in moving from mere access to a genuine sense of belonging.