Are there people you’re connecting with during your time here at UAMS? Who makes up your pack, your crowd, your network, your peeps? Are you including the people you collaborate, study, and work with as part of your coursework? What about the instructors and practitioners who serve as mentors and advisers? Don’t forget the students and faculty from your IPE groups. These are some of the people you have in your learning community.
What is a Learning Community
A learning community is a group of people who share common academic goals and meet together to collaborate on coursework and increase their learning. They can be formal structured communities like the academic houses in the Colleges of Medicine and Nursing. They can also be informal groups of the people you go to for exam reviews, group projects, and collaborative research papers.
Benefits of a Learning Community
There are a number of good reasons for building/participating in a learning community.
Study Partners. Being part of a community means you always have a stable group of people working together to make the learning more effective. The students share resources that that can make learning easier. Therefore, they feel more prepared for exams by quizzing one another and explaining difficult information.
Out-of-Class Experiences. Whether it’s service learning, volunteer opportunities, or interprofessional projects, connecting with others in a community will make learning more meaningful, authentic, and interprofessional.
Connections to Instructors and Mentors. Building relationships through service learning and volunteer opportunities with instructors and practitioners will help you know where you will want to go in your profession after you have graduated.
Lasting Friendships and Professional Relationships. The people you connect with today will be the people you will work with as you build your professional career, and move your profession forward in providing the best possible health care experience.
Chances are you have already gathered people both from inside and outside your program into a learning community. They are the people you go to regularly for study sessions and labor with on group projects. Enjoy these relationships. They make your learning better and increase your satisfaction with your time here at UAMS.