A quick glance at the OU Network on Facebook shows many students have created groups for courses they are studying. Many of these groups only have a handful of members - who were potentially friends anyway? Or they may have been established by people looking for friends on a course.
What the formation of groups suggest to me is that some students want to create their own break out spaces where they can talk about a particular course outside of the university context (maybe because their VLE doesn't allow student created groups, maybe because they don't like the environment the institution offers, maybe because the setting is "too formal").
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