In July, the work reached an international stage. We presented at EDULEARN24, the 16th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, held in Palma, Spain, from the 1st to the 3rd of July 2024, in front of educators and researchers from around the world.
The paper was titled Bridging Minds: CampusConnected, an Iteration of Everconnected, Enhancing Social Connectedness and Mental Wellbeing in Higher Education. The argument behind that long title is short: connection is not a soft extra in higher education. It is bound up with whether students stay well, stay enrolled, and succeed. Belonging is not separate from academic outcomes; it underwrites them.
Presenting alongside education researchers from dozens of countries did two things for us. It pressure-tested the thinking against people who study learning and wellbeing for a living, and it confirmed that the problem we were studying, social disconnection among students, is genuinely global. The same loneliness shows up on campuses everywhere, in every language. So, increasingly, does the will to do something real about it.