1. Developing a Criminal Justice Community
Ester Ragonese and Rebecca Crook

2. What we wanted to do……. Focus on transition from level 4 and 5
Increased student engagement at level 5
Development of an ‘effective’ community BB site
Practice embedded in programme delivery
Incorporating the student voice
Increased student engagement at all levels

3. What we did……. Appoint students to work on the project
Develop the BB site(s)
Specific area for level 5 students
Embed Twitter
Set up a Facebook group

4. What issues did we face…….
Delay in starting with the project
For anyone adopting this approach, having full staff teams on board would assist with the smooth running of the sites
Gaining student feedback as early as possible would benefit when modifying the sites, both of these points unfortunately suffered due to time restraints during this process
Tracking is used to record the level of engagement with students; this could be improved by lecturers on the Criminal Justice programmes referring Level 5 students to the sites to access the information that could assist them with their assignments/study skills/general programme information etc. If these community sites are to work they need to be adopted by full teaching teams in engaging with students and using them for work resources and engaging with Level 4/5 students over the summer.
 Student feedback would allow for us to move the sites on and to evolve them to meet the expectations of future Level 5 students, this has been difficult as attempting to engage via course reps/ Board of study meetings has been difficult. There is a possibility of creating an online survey on the sites to gain feedback, however this obviously requires students to be on the sites initially to complete such surveys.
Embedding the new live Twitter feed onto the sites has seen a positive promotion of engaging with students and other Criminal Justice professionals; this again could be further promoted by all staff members using the Twitter account to highlight any topical news items or relevant and contemporary Criminal Justice comments/debates etc.
For anyone adopting this approach, having full staff teams on board would assist with the smooth running of the sites and gaining student feedback as early on as possible would benefit when modifying the sites, both of these points unfortunately suffered due to time restraints during this process.

5. The future…….
Student feedback (online survey)- use results to maintain and modify site to best suit needs of the students focusing on Level 5 area
Sustainability- full staff team involvement and possibility of using course representatives from all 3 programmes to maintain the sites as part of their role
An online survey can be developed through the community sites to engage with students via the Blackboard VLE and to generate their feedback on what they would like to see available on the community sites and what would benefit them during Level 5 particularly.
As previously mentioned, full staff involvement was not part of this project and was limited due to time restraints however for maintaining these sites in the future, it has been suggested that course representatives are used to maintain the sites as part of their role with assistance from the staff team, this way the students can have the first hand technical maintenance role and staff can also use the sites for student engagement and could boost the student tracking by highlighting the sites in lectures by proactively using the community sites for resources/ activities etc.