Temporal flexibility in the digital university: full-time, part-time, flexitime

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the persistent theme of flexibility in online distance education. It argues that, while a discourse of flexibility promises opportunities for access to online education, it also has the potential to devalue it by paying too little attention to education’s time-consuming practices, often perpetuating a notion of teaching and learning that is depicted as atemporal and free from the constraints of time. The article draws on case study interviews with staff and students engaged in a distance education expansion project in a UK university. A temporal analysis highlights institutional adjustments towards flexibility and draws attention to interview accounts that are indicative of a culture of combined work and study that is beyond full-time, in a wider context in which part-time study is aligned with affordability and made unproblematic as a flexible mode of access. Further research on time and temporality in distance and higher education is recommended.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital education
• higher education
• flexibility
• part-time
• temporality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^* For further work on the extended campus and the relationship between time and space for distance students, see Sheail (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philippa Sheail

Dr Philippa Sheail is a lecturer in digital education at the University of Edinburgh, based at the Centre for Research in Digital Education. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, based in the area of digital and higher education, drawing on organisational theory, cultural geography and social theories of time.