Learning online? Educational Internet use and participation in adult learning, 2002 to 2010

Abstract

Covering a decade during which the “digital divide” came to popular and political attention, and written at a time when the Internet continues to be championed as a means of widening access to educational opportunities, this paper presents an analysis of the social, economic and educational characteristics associated with using the Internet for educational purposes. The research was conducted using nationally-representative, individual-level, repeated cross-sectional data (n = 47,001) collected in annual surveys of adults in the UK between 2002 and 2010. The results of multivariate analyses show that although there was a substantial increase in both Internet access and non-educational use of the Internet during this period, there was comparatively little growth in “educational” Internet use. As with participation in adult learning more generally, educational Internet use was structured by age, occupational class and educational engagement. The growth in the availability of Internet access and the development of new technologies appears to have neither increased nor widened participation in adult learning. This growth does not appear to have impacted on the social characteristics of those who use the Internet for educational purposes, nor led to any substantial uptake in Internet-based learning among already educationally-active groups.

Keywords:

• adult learning
• lifelong learning
• Internet
• participation
• digital exclusion
• inequalities

Notes

1. Responses in the data sets were only recorded as “yes” or “no”, or were classified as “missing”.

2. Participation in current or recent learning was the independent variable with the strongest relationship to “learning on/offline”. However, as those “learning on/offline” must also be learning, including this independent variable in the model results in a tautological explanation. Respondents reporting “learning on/offline” but not current or recent learning were removed from the analysis. A similar issue arose for using the Internet to “find information for learning or training” but, for this dependent variable, respondents were only excluded if they reported neither “participation in current or recent learning” nor the “intention to learn in the near future”.

3. Analysis of this variable, using the Internet to help children with homework, was conducted using a sub-sample of respondents reporting having children in their household. While it is possible that this excludes some valid cases, exploratory analyses were conducted with both the sample and sub-sample. The results from the analysis of the complete sample were inconsistent between years and so the models relating to the sub-sample are presented here. The same “response-based” re-sampling technique described earlier was applied to this sub-sample.