ONLINE EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITIES AND ADOLESCENTS' SENSE OF COMMUNITY AND BELONGING: IMPLICATIONS FOR WELL-BEING AND LEARNING IN BLENDED SECONDARY EDUCATION

Since the period of emergency remote teaching, online educational communities have become part of everyday life in secondary schools, whether they are hosted on learning management systems such as Open eClass or on school-oriented platforms such as e-me. Yet they are still valued mainly as places to share materials and collect assignments. Much less attention has been paid to whether they can help adolescents feel part of a community and feel that they belong. This theoretical article addresses that gap by bringing together two bodies of research that seldom meet: work on online learning communities and blended learning, and work on sense of community and school belonging in adolescence. Online educational communities are first defined, and the forms they take are outlined, along with the ways they support learning and fit into blended designs. The focus then shifts to sense of community and sense of belonging, and to evidence linking them to adolescents’ eudaimonic well-being, understood as living and functioning well, as well as to their motivation, engagement and learning. From these strands emerges a set of design principles for cultivating belonging in online and blended school communities. Equal attention goes to the obstacles: digital inequality, the use of platforms mainly for monitoring students, and the tendency to equate community with participation counts. Online communities can strengthen adolescents’ sense of belonging, but only under three conditions. They need to be part of a coherent blended design, sustained by a teacher who is visibly present and caring, and built around collaborative tasks that matter to students.