Ctrl + Alt + Delete: Rebooting our peer mentoring scheme - or learning from experience

Most scholarship blogs describe an intervention which aims to improve learning and teaching, sharing its robust evaluation and making recommendations to use this evidence to strengthen teaching in other courses, Schools or Universities. However, we are going to do something slightly different!

In this blog we will focus on what we have learnt about using WhatsApp to support our Open University (OU) Law School peer-mentoring project – with both expected and unexpected consequences.

Five years and four pilots complete and still going

The value of peer-mentoring for students new to university study is well-established (Finlay-Jones and Ross 2006), and of particular importance in a distance learning environment where studying can be isolating (Edwards, Gregory, and Hardie 2021). However, establishing a successful peer-mentoring model at scale in a distance learning setting model takes time and perseverance. Five years on and with four pilots completed, we are now planning a fifth pilot in 26-27 as we continue to research the most effective communication tool to connect students with each other.

For those who have not read our previous blogs about this journey, in brief we set up our first pilot scheme five years ago, in February 2020. Students on the introductory Law course from two geographical areas were offered the opportunity to join their fellow students in small groups, mentored by a more experienced law student using Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) -based forums. This was rolled out to all 2,000 students on the same course in October 2020. Our evaluation showed that students were keen to be supported through peer-mentoring schemes but felt the technology used was slow, unresponsive and inaccessible.

In response to these concerns, and following repeated student requests to use social media, we set up a third small scale pilot in October 2022 using WhatsApp as the main form of communication. Following a careful evaluation using both qualitative (interviews and focus groups with student mentors and mentees) and quantitative methods (analysis of retention and outcome data) we rolled out the scheme to all 1,500 students starting our introductory Law module in October 2024. And we have not yet finished: after evaluating the 2024 pilot, we are now looking at starting another pilot in October 2026.

Our findings

All four pilots demonstrated the value of peer-mentoring for students. The mentee students appreciated having access to a mentor and a safe place where they could ask questions. One mentee said [it was] “really nice to have a place where [they] could chat and ask questions of people who knew the boundaries and who have been through it” [without] “bugging my tutor”. The mentors have developed employability skills and were provided with an arena in which they could demonstrate these skills (for example communication, teamwork and moderation skills).

However, in the first two pilots, which used forums, students were clear the forums were not effective even though the idea of mentoring at a distance had value. They told us the forums were clunky and required too many clicks to access. In our most recent pilots, which used WhatsApp as the means of communication for the many-to-many mentoring approach, we concluded that WhatsApp is an effective medium for mentoring because of its informality and accessibility. However, there were challenges to using WhatsApp for the project team, particularly when it was used at scale – for example around resourcing and data protection.

One thing we did note was that students were much more engaged when using WhatsApp. There were a number of regular posters, others who posted less regularly and some ‘lurkers’, who may well have benefited from reading the posts on the group. When the pilot came to an end there were 59 students still subscribed to the group.

Scaling smartly: Lessons from using WhatsApp to support students

In scaling up the project and offering it to all 1,500 students, we also learnt a lot about how to identify and mitigate the risks involved with using a third-party social media site as our main communication tool. Some of these were expected and planned for, whilst others were more unexpected. We hope that by sharing these with you, anyone thinking about using WhatsApp (or other social media tools) to support students will be better prepared and can learn from our experiences.

Our ten top tips using WhatsApp to form student communities:

1. A separate project phone

At the OU WhatsApp can be used with students, but staff and student administrators cannot use their personal mobile phones. We purchased cheap phones for our moderators (a tutor and student intern) to set up the WhatsApp groups, and they then downloaded WhatsApp (using the new mobile phone number) onto their laptops. What we failed to do was to ensure one of the project team had access to a project phone, which meant we were reliant on our tutor and student intern’s availability when we needed to react to a post. In future we would also ensure that a separate phone was available to the project team, even though we were not actively moderating the groups.

2. Who will have administration rights?

The more the merrier! As with the phone, we gave our tutor and student intern administration rights. Ideally, we needed to have a couple more people as administrators as well, including members of the project team, in case of illness or other unexpected problem.

3. Student consent

When forming communities on WhatsApp, telephone numbers are automatically shared with other members. We got written consent from our students to share their phone numbers as part of their application to join the group. This was much more time intensive than simply sharing a link with all the students on the module – but essential to comply with data protection law. If a link does need to be shared for any reason, only share with students who have provided written consent, and double check that only these students are using this link.

4. Preventing students from joining the WhatsApp group

Some students were not able to join our WhatsApp group – for safeguarding reasons, we could not allow anyone under the age of eighteen to join, or offender learners in prison or on licence. We had to design a process which allowed us to check all applications to join the group against a central list, making sure that only the project team had access to the sensitive information about these students.

5. Offer an alternative

We therefore set up an alternative to WhatsApp for those not able (or wishing) to engage with it. We used a moderated forum on the university VLE alongside WhatsApp, and this arrangement worked well. It is also worth considering whether sub-groups would be useful for students with particular needs or interests. These can be set up under the umbrella of the WhatsApp Community Group, or as separate threads on a forum. However, it is necessary to ensure these reflect the students’ priorities and are established early on in the project when students are keen to make connections.

6. Moderation

The peer-mentors moderated the group for the purposes of supporting the students, whilst two student interns and a tutor acted as overall moderators. We agreed with the latter guidelines about student behaviour and speed of response. However, in practice there were no posts requiring a direct intervention, apart from one isolated incident when a student’s account was hacked: this was quickly identified and the account suspended.

7. Resourcing

We underestimated the time it would take to run the project. It took more time than anticipated to set up the group (including obtaining student consent and manually adding students to the group). We also found that due to the accessibility of WhatsApp, it took more time to moderate the group than our normal VLE based forums.

8. Sharing of information on WhatsApp

We advised the students what they could, and could not share, on WhatsApp. However our request that students do not share photographs of their children (for safeguarding reasons) met an unexpected hurdle as many students had photos of their children as part of their profile. We then had to ask them to change their profile picture, which we did not expect.

9. Blocking students from WhatsApp

We only needed to block one student from the group, due to the hacked account referred to above. In that case the student fully co-operated with us. However, we did agree beforehand a clear process for doing this, in case of student challenge. (They are law students, after all….)

10. Compliance with institutional policies

There were many internal policies to consider and comply with - data protection, safeguarding and social media policies, the Student Code of Conduct and the Social Media Toolkit. We had to familiarise ourselves thoroughly with these before and during the project to make sure we had identified and mitigated all possible risks.

To find out more

To find out more details about these ten top tips, read our “WhatsApp Communities in Legal Education" Guidance document. We would love to chat further with people who have used, or are planning to use, WhatsApp or any other social media tool to support peer mentoring. Please do get in touch with us via [email protected]

With thanks to the Faculty of Business and Law’s scholarship centre, SCiLAB, who provided funding for many of the pilot evaluations (including the 2024 WhatsApp fourth pilot).

You can find out more about our 2022 pilot in ‘WhatsApp reaches the students other peer-mentoring schemes cannot reach: a case study exploring the experiences of using WhatsApp for online peer-mentoring support’ Edwards, Hardie and Ritchie (2025) Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change, Vol 11, No 1,

References

J Finlay-Jones and N Ross ‘Peer Mentoring for Law Students — Improving the First Year Advocacy Experience’ (2006) Law Teacher 23, 40(1).

Edwards, Carol; Gregory, Lorraine and Hardie, Liz (2021). Setting up a Pilot Peer Mentoring Programme in the Online Environment. Journal of Rights and Justice, 2 pp. 7–17

Carol Edwards

Carol is a Senior Lecturer in Legal Online Pedagogy, Lead for Retention and Outcomes (Law) and Student Experience Manager. She is actively involved in the scholarship relating to online teaching pedagogy and has presented and published on this area. She has a very keen interest in tackling student and staff isolation and is actively involved in several projects attempting to address this area. These include the online mentoring programme, co-founder of The Belonging Project, with particular focus on developing student confidence. She is part of a pan-university team exploring belonging across the Open University.

Liz Hardie

Liz Hardie is Director of SCiLAB (the Faculty of Business and Law’s Scholarship centre) and a senior lecturer of the Open University Law School. She also works for the Open Justice Centre supervising law students carrying out pro bono projects both as part of their law degree and on an extra-curricular basis. Her research interests include online learning and the use of technology in legal education, including the impact of generative AI on teaching and access to justice. Liz is also interested in how to support students online to feel part of the academic community, and co-founded the Law School Belonging Project 4 years ago.

Kate Richie

Kate Ritchie is a Senior Lecturer in Law in the OU Law School and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research focuses on the theme of ‘belonging’. Kate’s scholarship projects explore how online platforms, such as WhatsApp, can facilitate peer mentoring and ‘belonging’ more broadly, as well as understanding the enablers of, and barriers to, effective legal education for students in secure environments (SISE). She is also interested in investigating the scope for game-based learning to facilitate the development of online communities.