Physical support centers for math and statistics have played an important role in supporting students and improving their success rates in maths-intensive courses. At the Arctic University of Norway (UiT), engineering students have the opportunity to study at five different campuses or to participate as an online student. The campuses are quite small, and it is difficult to maintain physical support centers. The number of online students is also increasing, and we therefore decided to offer online support using Discord. Online students can often feel lonely and struggle with their motivation, and the idea behind using Discord was to create the students’ own learning community, a place where the students can find belonging and motivation for their studies. In the presentation I shall share our experiences from using Discord. Statistics and feedback from both students and tutors will be presented, and I will discuss what to think about when setting up a Discord server for support. This has been a part of the project MSLS-Net, a collaboration between universities in Norway and the Czech Republic, where the aim was to enhance the quality of mathematics and statistics learning support across partner institutions in both countries.

For slides and more see http://talmo.uk/2024/enablinginteract...