The faculty of social sciences at the Open University is concerned with student engagement beyond the module, and is initiating new ways of engaging students that could change the way we teach in terms of distance learning, mass-scale participation, and synchronous online learning. In response to the challenges of engaging undergraduate, part-time students, we have been experimenting with methods of engagement to create a community that students can opt into. This relates to progression and retention since it has been found that isolation can have an effect on students continuing with their studies (Zebke, 2014). We are doing this through a related portfolio of multimedia outputs: podcasts (This Student Life, a drama, and The Podmag, a news podcast), student videos (HEA funded), online workshops (activate session), which culminated in the online conference “Student Connections” which was recently streamed live over five days. The aim of the conference was to connect students and academics within a virtual community, and it has delivered something unique in terms of teaching; participants were able to discuss the issues presented in the talks and raise questions which were then discussed on a live panel. This dialogue between online and face to face environments presents real opportunity to change the way that we engage students in HE, particularly those in a distance learning environment and also in terms of mass scale. The other innovative aspect was that students were invited to present at the conference and were nurtured (but not “taught”) during a series of online meetings. These students created a very impressive series of individual and group presentations which have been met with approval from the academic community, demonstrating that an online conference can generate connections and add value for both students and academics. The result of these initiatives is a very engaged group of students who are now generating blogs and other forms of data about the experience and who now form the research sample. The researchers are now analysing the data and other outputs. It is clear that this engagement has given students confidence to progress their studies further and that being connected to a group of other students can help when life makes staying engaged difficult. We are now evaluating these components and this paper will outline these in the context of effective methods of student engagement.