Establishing faculty-based peer-led Pomodoro® online study communities

Abstract

The University of Nottingham Libraries’ Learning Development (Academic Skills) team started hosting ‘Study With Us’ (online study community utilising the Pomodoro® Technique) sessions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a means to provide an online community and a connection to the University for students during lockdown periods. Post-pandemic, these sessions continue to be hosted once a week during term time with an average attendance of 12 (minimum 4, maximum 23, between October 2022 and January 2023). There has been a demand for an increase in the frequency of the sessions from the existing participants. The team have limited resources and would struggle to host any additional sessions on a regular basis. Following some initial research with the current ‘Study With Us’ community to discern the actual requirements for additional sessions, there was some demand for faculty-specific sessions to be hosted. Therefore, we teamed up with the Faculty of Engineering to work with their peer mentors to establish the efficacy of running a regular peer-led Pomodoro® online study community specifically for engineering students with the aim of establishing if this model was suitable to be rolled out across all five faculties and hence cater for the increase in demand for the study sessions. The aim of the session is to share: the research so far; an evaluation of the process of setting up the initiative with the faculties and the peer mentors; some initial analysis of the experiences of the session participants to establish the success, demand for and future direction of ‘Study With Us’ at the University.