Life-on-campus or my-time-and-screen: identity and agency in online postgraduate courses

ABSTRACT

Numbers of online postgraduate coursework students are increasing within higher education and this raises questions of identity – what being a student means to this more mature cohort. This in-depth qualitative investigation explores postgraduate student identities within online learning. We conducted interviews (14) and collected completed longitudinal audio diaries from students (3) enrolled in a range of postgraduate programs. We interpreted two social imaginaries or ‘figured worlds’ that describe participants’ sense of who they ought to be. The life-on-campus figured world projected a ‘traditional’ student who read textbooks, inhabits classrooms and talks with lecturers. Alternatively, my-time-and-screen figured world projected a technologically-enabled student whose world is mediated by software, devices, their own spaces and a sense of self-sufficiency. These insights afford new ways of thinking about the diversity of the student cohort and how course designs might accommodate the multiplicity of ways online postgraduate students view themselves and their studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Online education
• qualitative research
• figured worlds
• student identities
• agency

Introduction

Identity shapes learning. Our learning experiences are strongly influenced by the projections of our possible futures (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). In other words, who we think we are becoming is directly connected with what and how we choose to learn. Equally, attending university shapes identity. The centrality of identity formation to college students’ development was established in the 1960s by Chickering (Davis 2019). However, this seminal work comes from a time when higher education was almost solely a school-leaver campus experience: an educational rite of passage for young people. While there has been some limited work on the role of identity in online higher education (Delahunty, Verenikina, and Jones 2014), there are still many questions about what it means to be a student within an online university space in general and for postgraduate coursework studies in particular.

From a sociocultural perspective, learning, knowledge and identity are firmly interlinked; engagement in social practice is the fundamental process by which we learn and so become who we are (Wenger 1998). Therefore, understanding identity is critical for program design. However, there is a limited investigation of what it means to be a postgraduate coursework student, who comes to university having completed one degree and frequently has experienced professional employment. Moreover, the question of identity may be troubled further, when learning shifts online. By understanding what it means to be an online postgraduate student, educators can design courses that take into consideration how students see themselves, rather than how others perceive them.

Postgraduate coursework students who study online

There has been a 25% rise in the number of postgraduate coursework students in the UK since 2015 (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2020); by 2020 they formed 28% of all students. In Australia, approximately half of postgraduate coursework students are studying online (University Rankings Australia 2020). The pandemic has forced online study to be 100% at times for many around the globe; this shift to ‘emergency remote teaching’ (Hodges et al. 2020, 1) may lead to more online students in the future. Taken together, this implies that postgraduate coursework students are an increasing cohort, with a probable majority studying online into the future.

The postgraduate online cohort fit the ‘trifecta’ for risk of attrition: part-time, not school-leaver and at distance (George, McEwan, and Tarr 2021). To give some sense of the likelihood of attrition, in 2018, 23.2% of commencing online postgraduate students in Australia attritted (Australian Government Department of Education Skills and Employment 2018). As Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb (2014, 580) describe, being an online postgraduate student is a fluid affair: students work across diverse course structures, learning environments, and national boundaries. Moreover, these students have generally already attended university and possibly have extensive experience as professionals, and they are experiencing relatively new online study practices that may or may not be congruent with their past study or current professional contexts. Understanding how this diverse cohort negotiates the complexities of ‘being a student’ may help institutions support postgraduate online students both to learn and to persist with their learning.

Conceptualising student identity development

At the most basic level, identity forms a way for a person to negotiate between themselves and the society in which they live. However, identity is a contested notion, underpinned by divergent theorisations, which in turn are highly dependent on researchers’ underpinning ontologies. For example, identity can be seen as controlled by the individual: a self-directed cognitive state, which reflects their holistic view of their own personhood. From this perspective, a person’s identity forms a component of what Baxter Magolda (2008, 279) calls self-authorship, a conscious and purposeful embracing of self, ‘a mechanism through which individuals frame their experience and construct their reactions to the external world’. In contrast, constructionist conceptualisations posit that a single person can hold multiple identities – such as mother, researcher and teacher – and that these are constantly in development. From this viewpoint, ‘Identities are constructed and co-constructed as we participate in day-to-day social activities and through the use of language and artefacts and within power relations’ (Monrouxe 2010, 41). We situate this study in this later conceptualisation but also note the role of individual agency, aligning with Holland et al. (1998), who acknowledge the intersection between an individual trajectory and the opportunities afforded by social positioning.

The contemporary higher education literature builds on the constructionist notion of identity as a general form of holistic lifelong development, to focus on particular types of ‘identity work’. There is considerable interest in how higher education affords development of disciplinary or professional identities (Tan, Van der Molen, and Schmidt 2017; Trede, Macklin, and Bridges 2012). Studies taking a social justice perspective consider structural boundaries such as race and class (Chavous et al. 2018; Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2010). The digital is also matter of concern: Goode’s (2010) work on ‘technology identities’ compares the affordances of home, school and universities and illustrates how inequality has persistent effects and contributes to a ‘digital divide’.

However, these studies do not focus on what ‘being a university student’ means to the students themselves. While it is clearly important – Ragusa and Crampton (2018, 137) suggest that the ‘self-identity as a university student positively correlated with sense-of-connection.’ – we have little insight into how student identities might be constructed or contested. Indeed, Daniels and Brooker (2014, 74) note that ‘Student identity development, as part of the overall experience of university learning, has been largely forgotten … ’. By exploring how postgraduate students view themselves as students, we seek to illuminate how they negotiate learning within the affordances of online postgraduate education.

‘Figured worlds’: a theory of identity and agency

We now turn to a specific theorisation of identity and agency to frame this study. ‘Figured worlds’, Holland et al.’s (1998) theory of the intersection between identity and agency, has shaped many studies in the higher education literature. These include investigations of what it means to be a doctor (Bennett et al. 2017) or an engineer (Gonsalves et al. 2019) or a student who persists following failure (Ajjawi, Dracup, and Boud 2021). ‘Figured worlds’ theorises the intersection of identity (as social constructions) with agency (what individuals do). It is consonant with other relevant theorisations of identity, including Biesta et al.’s (2008) view of ‘learning lives’: a lifeworld produced in the interconnections between learning, identity, agency and capital. It also aligns with conceptualisations of online learning as a pervasive, everyday part of contemporary social existence, both in formal and informal learning spaces (Erstad and Sefton-Green 2013).

The foundational notion underpinning this theory is that identities are formed in response to collective imaginaries or shared stories of our social world. These collective imaginaries are ‘figured worlds’ – inhabited by idealised roles, actions and preferred outcomes. For example, a physician is associated with a set of activities and places and possible trajectories – the ‘figured world’ of a doctor. This is a collective vision: aspirational, never achievable and constantly being shaped and re-shaped by social forces. According to Holland et al. (1998), not all ‘figured worlds’ are available to us: we are constantly positioned by our social structures, such as the relationships between doctors and nurses within healthcare. Moreover, ‘figured worlds’ and social structures change through collective rather than individual effort.

People respond to these ‘figured worlds’ by affiliating with them or distancing from them. Holland et al. (1998, 169) label this process of ‘self-fashioning’ as authoring. This identity work forms how an individual makes sense of the figured world, within the constraints of broader social structures. For example, when a medical student narrates how she encounters a senior doctor who is brusque with patients, she does not identify with this behaviour but affiliates herself with the figured world of ‘the caring doctor’, where compassion is a central tenet of being a medical professional (Bennett et al. 2017). Thus, this student authors herself ‘through and around’ this and other figured worlds as she experiences what it means to be a medical student. While individuals can and do surmount the prescriptions of the ‘figured world’, authoring takes into account these powerful social structures. Understanding what these ‘figured worlds’ are, therefore, can provide insight into how individuals can negotiate them. In the case of our online coursework postgraduate participants, it may illuminate how they navigate their studies.

Focus of this study

In this study, we seek insight into how postgraduate coursework students identify with being an online student. The overall aim is to support learning and success of these students, through understanding how they view the activities and trajectories associated with being an online student. This research asks: how do postgraduate students, enrolled fully or partially online, author themselves in and around figured worlds related to their study?

Methods

Overview and context

This qualitative study of online student identity was conducted in the context of a single Australian university. It is set within an insitutional program that employeda centralised learning design using the FutureLearn platform, more generally known as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) software, to deliver postgraduate certificates, diplomas and masters degrees. Units of study (or subjects) employed a ‘digital-first’ learning design that saw all content that might have traditionally been delivered through lectures replaced with stepped videos and text-based resources, and complemented by interactive online learning activities. Informed by Holland et al.’s (1998) figured worlds approach, we undertook semi-structured interviews and longitudinal audio diaries. This study took place in parallel to a mixed methods evaluation of the platform (Bearman, Lambert, and O’Donnell 2021). Ethical approval was granted by the Deakin University Faculty of Arts & Education Human Ethics Advisory Group (reference: HAE-17-101).

Sample and data collection

A research assistant invited all students enrolled in these ‘digital first’ subjects to contact us for participation in both the evaluation and the research study. There were two forms of data collection: interviews, followed by the possibility of submitting longitudinal audio diaries. Longitudinal audio diaries capture in-the-moment reflections over time (Williamson et al. 2015) and have been used in other identity studies (Gordon, Rees, and Jindal-Snape 2020). In our study, participants recorded responses weekly over five weeks to prompts asking them to recall an experience with their online learning that stuck in their minds. See Table 1 for interview and longitudinal diary questions.

Table 1. Interview and audio diary prompts.

Guiding interview questions included:	Have you ever undertaken online learning before? Briefly, describe your career thus far – What other professions or roles have you had? What other courses have you undertaken? How would you describe your current professional role? What do you hope to gain from enrolling in the course? Do you think of yourself as a student? If so, how would you describe the type of student you are. If not, why?
Audio diary prompts included:	An experience that made you think differently about who you are as a professional or where your career might be heading. An experience that made you think differently about the subject matter or how you learn. An interaction outside of your studies, in your personal or professional spheres, that influenced your studies.

Fourteen students responded to our request for interviews. Participants were enrolled in Graduate Certificate (2), Graduate Diploma (4) and Masters (8) courses. Four identified as female and ten as male. There were six part-time domestic, two full-time domestic and six full-time international students. Ten students were enrolled in information technology or business analytics or similar degrees; two were enrolled in a health degree; one was enrolled in a construction degree and one in a humanities degree. Eight of the fourteen reported previous online experience. All students’ unit experiences were primarily online. For some students, notably those whose visas required on campus enrolment, these resources were complimented by a series of on-campus seminars.

Four interviewees also responded to our invitation to submit longitudinal audio diaries. Three participants completed four short reflections on a weekly basis over five weeks in response to prompts asking them to recall an experience with their online learning that stuck in their minds (see Table 1). The three participants were: a full-time domestic student enrolled in a health degree; a part-time domestic student enrolled in an information technology degree and a full-time international student enrolled in an information technology degree. None had previously studied online.

Data analysis

Transcripts were analysed inductively but sensitised with the ideas of identity and agency. The first parse at analysis employed the framework analysis method (Ritchie and Spencer 2002). The research team read two randomly selected transcripts and discussed the main themes identified in the data. The lead author and a research assistant (see acknowledgements) developed a coding framework, which was used to categorise the data. The second parse involved the full team collectively reading full transcripts and interpreting higher order themes; the team inductively identified key potential figured worlds. The lead author re-analysed all transcripts with respect to how students authored themselves within the interpreted figured worlds. The analysis is presented through narrative descriptions of the figured worlds, following Holland et al’s (1998) reliance on presenting interpretations via participant voices. We also include thematic categories (Table 2) to aid readability.

Table 2. Thematic categories.

Category	Description of thematic category
What students intend	Two predominant desires: wanting to learn and meeting requirements
Life-on-campus figured world	The ‘traditional’ imaginary of ‘being a student’ on campus: built through relationships with people and places
My-own-time-and-screen figured world	An imaginary of ‘being an online student’: technologically adept, flexible in time and space, and self-sufficient.
Alignments with figured worlds	How students aligned their identities with these figured worlds, in sometimes competing and contradictory ways.
Intersections with other figured worlds	How students aligned themselves with other figured worlds, particularly professional identities.

Results

Participants described their sense of being a student as being underpinned by two predominant and often simultaneously held desires (see Table 2). We deliberately employ the term ‘desire’, to describe this sense of general orientation rather than an articulated goal. The first was a desire for learning. As one participant noted: ‘I'm involved, I'm engrossed. I'm not necessarily after the best mark. I'm after the best learning experience.’ (S7). Participants also articulated that being a student meant meeting requirements: ‘it was really just about getting through the degree’ (S15). For some this was because being a student was ‘ultimately about having the bit of paper [the credential].’ (S11). These desires could be held simultaneously, appeared to be experienced as a tension and underpinned both of the figured worlds we interpreted from the data (see Table 2). We now articulate each figured world, before describing how students authored themselves around them, thenbriefly discuss how these intersected with other identities mentioned by participants.

Life-on-campus figured world

The life-on-campus figured world projected a ‘traditional’ student who has an on-campus experience, replete with coffee, lecturers, textbooks and classrooms. When one participant was asked if they felt like a student, they responded:

so do I feel like someone that actually goes to uni and studies on campus? No, but yes in terms of actually studying I do feel like a student. (S9)

This quote indicates how the figured world of the ‘on-campus experience’ (S8) loomed large in participants’ minds, even at a distance.

Participants referred to being an ‘old school’ (S6) or ‘traditional’ (S9) student. Participants built up a rich picture of this world, even though for the most part they were not experiencing it. They talked about the material world: spaces such as the ‘classroom’ (S13), ‘physical lectures’ (S12), ‘physical library’ (S14), ‘places on campus you go and eat, and get coffee’ (S14). They referred to physical objects: most particularly ‘textbooks’ (S11) and ‘student cards’ (S13). This figured world emphasised the relational, both with teachers – ‘the professor, student, personal relation[s]’ (S8) - and other students: ‘[to] bounce ideas off people’ (S6), ‘I learn by talking to people’ (S12), and through ‘social activities’ (S8). For a full-time international student, the life-on-campus experience contained a strongly social element:

it's more fun, more engaging, it's part of living abroad, being part of other groups. (S8)

We saw this relationality as a key part of this figured world, where the student develops through their interactions with people and spaces. It is noteworthy that the student described travelling to particular environments to build this relationality.

My-time-and-screen figured world

Alternatively, my-time-and-screen figured world projected a technologically enabled student whose world is mediated by software, their own spaces and a sense of self-sufficiency. This was often constructed relative to the life-on-campus figured world; while students tended to describe themselves within both figured worlds, they did so with reference to the other.

The my-time-and-screen imaginary was located in a space of the participants’ choosing: ‘I've got my own desk, my own screens, laptop, ready to go so I've got my own work area to do online study’ (S9); ‘I don't need to attend physical lectures, I can do everything online’ (S4); ‘I grabbed the iPad out on the train on the way to work and on the way home’ (S13). The spaces follow students within this imaginary, not the other way around:

I'll be posted [as part of job] at the end of this year, but I'll continue studying at [the university], so it does provide me that flexibility no matter where I'm posted to continue study. (S15)

This world casts the students as in charge of their own study-time:

[online study] is going to be great. It's going to be convenient for me … I'll save time not travelling, and I can pick and choose when I do it. It's going to be really great. (S6)

Being a student in the my-time-and-screen figured world implied being technologically ‘savvy’. Participants listed their experience of different forms of platforms to underline how they belonged to this figured world. For example, one participant noted:

I've done a lot of online learning before. I've done Coursera, I've done EdX, in fact I've done FutureLearn as well. (S1)

In this figured world, we interpret the students identify as being in control and self-sufficient. They choose what they do, when they do it and what they listen to. This was often articulated as flexibility:

Flexibility is the word of the day. And that'll be the word of my degree. (S9)

Authoring selves between life-on-campus and my-time-and-screen

Participants described both figured worlds in their accounts. Even though the worlds tended to be understood in reference to each other, we interpret that participants projected their own lives in and around both figured worlds. Often understanding who they were as a student was explored by aligning themselves to one figured world over the other, while accepting that both existed. For example, one participant commented:

online study [is] actually awesome … It's the way we're going forward to be perfectly honest. I'm not saying traditional methods are horrendous. I think traditional methods are terrific methods. I have a sister who studies science at [another university] … She's [as] traditional as it gets. (S9)

All participants understood the life-on-campus figured world even though their studies did not necessarily require on-campus attendance. For older participants, it tended to loom particularly large, although almost all participants had attended university on campus as an undergraduate previously. On the other hand, those who aligned themselves with the my- time-and-screen figured world, tended to be those who particularly chose online (as opposed to it being the only way they could complete the subject) or who were studying technology related subjects. For example, one participant indicated: ‘I've always been the person to go to in the family and friends circle of fixing computers’ (S13). Another noted:

[my] parents asked me, “it's like look man, what are you even studying? Where do you study?” It's all in the brain. It's all online. It's all on the front of my screen. Happy days. (S9)

As the course continued, participants had to make sense of their experiences against these two figured worlds. This was not a straightforward process; some participants working around the identity of being a technologically savvy student, rather than embracing it outright. For example, one interviewee noted:

I’ve mentally ticked [digital tasks] off if I managed to accomplish them. Like for me it's been a big deal like going to … the virtual library. … Just pretty much every single thing [is] a bit of an accomplishment. I mean I've kind of patted myself on the back while I go ‘Right. Well I learned to do that now. Ah, good. (S14)

In this way, they see themselves on the edges of this figured world, but not identifying wholly with it.

The my-time-and-screen figured world was not just about being technologically capable. One participant authored herself into the strongly agentic ‘choose anywhere anytime’ student role. She noted:

I learn better, probably in physical lectures so it has been challenging … I've never done anything online so it kind of feels like you're really alone and I've never really done any kind of really autonomous work. [But I’ve found] exactly what my friend was saying [about online learning], you really just hone in on yourself. … Not focusing on other people can really actually make your work a lot better. (S10)

We interpret this as the participant accepting her role within the my-time-and-screen figured world, as an autonomous student who regulates their study rather than their study regulating them.

The audio diaries particularly note the competing and contradictory nature of authoring. Participants cast themselves in and around both figured worlds. On the one hand, a participant noted:

Computers are the way and the future for education of children, and I think that for adults too if they are computer-savvy, if they're technologically aware, that's probably the direction we should go in too’ but then later comments: ‘I still think that face to face and attending lectures provides me with a different kind of engagement that I don't get with the computer. The computer, I do not engage [with], really. (S6)

Aligning with different identities influenced how students saw the role of social engagement with peers. In general, aligning with the life-on-campus figured world, appeared to make the online interactions feel unsatisfying, while aligning with my-time-and screen figured world cast those same interactions as fulfilling. Two audio diary experiences illustrate this. S6, who strongly aligned with life-on-campus commented in their audio diary:

The discussion boards actually, I find clunky, cumbersome. There's no real connection because it could be days, weeks if you get an answer to anything, that you might ask. So, it might work for somebody, it doesn't work for me.

On the other hand, S5 who is very happy within the online space notes:

what I like the most is again, if I got any doubt, at any point in time, I can reach out to the discussion forum and get things sorted out, which can help me, as well as many fellow mates out there. (S5)

We interpret several things happening here. These are not the same online forums, so likely they are entirely different experiences; no claim is made that they are equivalent. However, it seems likely that strong alignment with a particular figured world also casts how the students perceive these interactions and therefore possibly even how they engage with them. In the life-on-campus figured world, students bounce ideas, drink coffee and have dynamic social relationships. In the my-time-and-screen figured world, agentic students reach out to each other, sharing information and providing help.

It is important to remember that these are figured worlds: imaginaries not actualities. In the same way that you can go to campus and be lonely and isolated, online learning does not necessarily fulfil the anticipated my-time-and-space ideals. But these experiences do not necessarily change the view of the figured world. For example, S5 reports how the materials ‘put you in align[ment] or in pace with the course’ but later notes that it is not the materials but they who are ‘managing time myself and monitoring the tasks’ (S5). This strongly structured learning design still presented S5 with the opportunity to align themselves with the my-time-and-screen where students are autonomous and self-regulated, even though the regulation may be significantly scaffolded by the unit structure.

Intersections with other identities

Participants were postgraduate students and many held full-time employment or had worked as professionals for extend periods of time. Therefore, most of them had significant investment in figured worlds beyond the academy. They spoke of rich histories as professionals and workers, and these shaped how they viewed themselves as students. What was most notable was the variation in how they authored themselves between these identifies of being a worker and a student. We give three contrasting examples. One participant highlighted they could be two things at once:

Yeah [I think of myself as a student]. Being that I'm studying. [But] I also consider myself as a professional economist. (S8)

On the other hand, another participant prioritised work over part-time study:

this is just something on the side … I wouldn't really call myself a student … because I'm only doing one subject. (S11)

Another saw the course as a means to a new career and separated professional work from employment:

I've actually quit my job in the public service to do my masters full time. So I just have a casual job at a café. [Study] is all I'm doing right now. (S12)

In other words, some saw being a student as a chance to have a tabula rasa while others integrated it with their current professional life while others invested it with a future projection of their career trajectory.

For some, student identity was wrapped up in gaining the qualification that gave them a competitive edge in their career. One participant noted:

I guess thinking about my career, when I get to the point of being a director or in a senior management position and I don’t want to go up for a role and be against someone else that has that bit of paper and that’s the reason that I’m not successful. (S11)

For this student, the figured world of employment privileges graduates, thus linking these two identities. One participant authored themselves out of the student identity almost entirely:

Look I'm not in student mode, I'm one of the busiest people I know so I've got, for me, and it's not about getting another set of initials on a business card, it's really, I want to learn the content, I want to learn it in the most efficient way and I see [the university] as a service provider, I don't see it as a university, in a hierarchical way, and a subservient student. I see it very much as a customer service provider relationship. (S10)

This may also speak to another figured world, student-as-consumer, although this was the only instance that we saw within our data.

Discussion

We interpreted two figured worlds of being an online postgraduate student: life-on-campus and my-time-and-screen. Participants from our cohort authored their sense of ‘being a student’ around these cultural imaginaries as well as other figured worlds, particularly those associated with employment. Participants’ understandings of ‘who they are’ and ‘who they are becoming’ was not the rational goal-setting that is often associated with online learning; this analysis reveals how being an online student may also mean authoring yourself into a broader social setting and multiple overlapping figured worlds. This appeared particularly true for those who were studying online due to circumstance rather than preference.

The life-on-campus figured world is particularly familiar. Movies, books and the popular press reinforce the longstanding familiar story of being a young adult undertaking rites of passage and meeting friends for coffee as part of campus life. As Bayne et al.’s (2014, 581) study of postgraduate online students shows ‘the material campus continues to be a symbolically and materially significant “mooring” for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus’. Similarly, Ross and Sheail (2017) researched how masters dissertation students long for ‘campus imaginaries’. Our study however provides a counter to Ross and Sheail’s research students who, as they interpreted, employed the campus imaginary to ‘deprivilege the online distance learning experience, and frame online learning as inauthentic, secondary to the campus, and inevitably inferior’ (Ross and Sheail 2017, 851). Almost all of our coursework participants found ways to figure themselves within the my- time-and- screen figured world, and for some who studied information technology, studying online was seen as preferable.

The figured world of the self-sufficient technologically savvy my-time-and- screen student is also a familiar one. For example, it aligns with the popular idea of the digital native, who ‘[invents] new, online ways of making each activity happen, based on the new technologies available to them’ (Prensky 2004). We hear echoes of this figured world in the language of educators describing what makes for successful online learners: that they are technologically skilled, they can manage their own time and space and that they must ‘possess a more independent learning style’ (Boyd 2004, 36). Of course the notion of the digital native has been shown to be a myth (Bennett, Maton, and Kervin 2008): however, identity work is about myth as much as reality.

This begs the question: how can we encourage students to recognise a richer form of digital life? Perhaps educators and institutions can play a role in more deeply acknowledging the social, material and virtual interconnections underpinning learning in a ‘postdigital’ society, one where ‘the disruption brought upon by digital information technology has already occurred.’ (Cramer 2015, 17). This means not only taking account of the pervasive and everyday nature of the ‘networked self’ through social media (see for example Papacharissi (2010)) but also appreciating that access to technologies are matters of ‘economic, cultural and social capital’ (Biesta et al. 2008, 17). That is to say, institutions could orient students towards supporting their learning through the ways they already employ technologies in their lifeworld but without making assumptions that everyone has access to particular resources.

This study shows how participants agentically author themselves within and around these figured worlds. Agency, in Holland et al.’s (1998) theorisation does not necessarily mean these worlds are consciously and rationally conceived and the audio diaries particularly describe competing and sometimes contradictory positions with respect to how students view themselves over time. Indeed the fractured, contradictory and often dichotomous relationship between these two figured worlds, might well be thought of as what political scientists call ‘paradoxes of identity change’ (Rumelili and Todd 2018, 12). These paradoxes are not readily reconciled or understood: as Rumelili and Todd (2018, 7) point out ‘identity is both sameness and difference. Identity denotes who we are, but we can only know who we are in relation to what we are not’. This is true of these figured worlds, they orbit in relation to each other. However, as mentioned, our participants moved between them, and sometimes away from them altogether towards some other figuration such as the ‘customer service provider relationship’ attributed by one participant. This latter orientation has detrimental effects on academic performance (Bunce, Baird, and Jones 2017) and it may be important to explicitly counter this type of consumer discourse.

This study identifies the simplified but contradictory ways in which online postgraduate students see themselves. This is an important contribution: it helps us understand who students imagine they ideally need to be and what they imagine they ideally need to do. As our participants report, these imaginings can shape students’ actions. So how should institutions and educators respond? While our own views of the potential of online education may be somewhat at odds with these figured worlds, recognising the strength of students’ social imaginaries cannot be understated. When Holland et al. (1998) described wholesale changing of figured worlds, they do so through the collective: whether it be incremental organic shifts or revolutionary collective movements. This accords with Selwyn’s (2014) work on the digital university where he describes the sociohistorical imperative for the new technology to maintain the status quo. In other words, figured worlds do change, but such changes cannot be directed by policy or by an individual.

Figured worlds analysis allows us to focus on trying to understand what this identity work does for the student experience. There are four key pedagogical implications arising from the data. First, learning and achievement are central activities for being a student, irrespective of cultural imaginary. Second, the social and relational imperative associated with inhabiting lectures and coffee shops in the life-on-campus world appeared to have no online equivalent. Third, the predominance of self-sufficiency was startling in the my-screen-and-time world. Finally, the presence of other figured worlds meant that ‘being a student’ was interpreted very diversely with respect to employment, with some relinquishing affiliation with prior figured worlds and others disaffiliating themselves from student worlds in favour of seeing themselves as professionals.

This maps out significant terrain for further research into design of online courses. In particular, interactions with others, whether they be social, instrumental or collaborative, could trouble students’ sense of identities. While some were satisfied, those who aligned with life-on-campus identities wanted more social or relational interaction, others who aligned with my-time-and-screen emphasised self-sufficiency. Some of our participants appeared to balance their study with what appeared to be satisfying interactions within their employment. This latter situation, where professional interactions become significant to how learning takes place in universities, may potentially and inadvertently mean that issues of equity and disadvantage become the fault of the individual student (Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb 2014).

We need to rethink how interaction designs can accommodate diverse cohorts in diverse disciplines. O’ Shea, Stone, and Delahunty (2015, 55) write about both undergraduates and postgraduates: ‘engagement for online learners may be more difficult [than face-to-face] and require additional or different approaches to forging connections between learners, content, institutions and also, staff’. Our study suggests, that for postgraduates at any rate, for those who align with life-on-campus perceive engaging online as more difficult, while for those who see themselves as more my-time-and-screen see it easier, albeit more transactional. At the moment, pedagogical design tends to assume that all students are seeking the same kind of interactions.

One possibility is for institutions to offer diverse descriptions of online study experiences, drawing from rich lifeworlds that speak to many, not just a few. The power of these stories is present in our data: we noted that S10 describes how the story of a friend’s experience of online study prompted a useful way for S10 to affiliate with the my-time-and-screen figured world. Perhaps, if educators and students collectively can offer diverse stories of what it means to be an online postgraduate coursework student, it can expand the communal sense of possibility. This might be at the level of the unit, course or institution. Our institutional language often prescribes rather than opens possibility for affiliating/disaffiliating with diverse cultural imaginaries of what it means to be a student. We cannot dictate identity but we can offer interpersonal and discursive opportunities to access and, preferably, interact with other ways of being. This also would allow institutions to provide stories that do not assume certain types of social capital or technological access. In this way, universities can highlight how education can be more than a transaction and how social links can form and develop through online study. Investigating the impact of such stories forms an area for future research.

Another means of considering how interactions are fostered in diverse ways is to consider the role of the platform. Our previous study suggested that software platforms themselves were not neutral with respect to learning (Bearman, Lambert, and O’Donnell 2021); it may be that the platforms such as FutureLearn with its MOOC associations could inadvertently reinforce or align with consumer orientations. The assumptions built into platforms are worth considering by institutions: how do they take account of the diversity that students bring to higher education?

Our study points to the importance of understanding the ways current and prior experiences of study intersect with broader cultural understandings of what being a student is or can be. In particular, it suggests an identity paradox looming large in postgraduate students’ lives, and how we may need to take account of this when designing new hybrid modes of learning. Online interaction, institutional representations and identity construction may provide important insights into how to promote learning and assist online students in completing their studies. At the very least, we can acknowledge the relationship between students’ identity work and how they navigate online learning. It may be easier for some students to continue their studies if they understand some of their challenges facing a re-negotiation of their identity in an online environment.

Strengths and limitations

As with any qualitative study, the in-depth localised nature of the investigation is both a strength and a weakness. It affords fine-grained analysis of the phenomenon at hand but also prohibits generalisations from the data. We interpret figured worlds, but these idealisations may be specific to our cohort with its associated program innovation, or to Australian higher education more generally, although we note resonances with UK studies (Bayne, Gallagher, and Lamb 2014). We particularly note the predominance of information technology students. However, at the same time, the sample contained a mix of domestic and international students as well as diverse disciplines. Moreover, the audio diaries afforded an in-depth look at how particular students’ experiences unfolded over time. We also note that data collection took place before the pandemic: this is a strength as students were not in ‘crisis’ teaching mode but it is also a limitation as the pandemic itself may have altered how students see themselves with respect to online education.

Conclusions

In this study, we interpreted online postgraduate students’ relationship with two social imaginaries: the life-on-campus figured world and my-time-and-screen figured world. Students authored themselves in and across both worlds, although some aligned themselves with one more than the other. Their sense of themselves as a life-on-campus student and/or a my-time-and-screen student at different moments aligned with how they valued social and relational interactions. As post the immediate pandemic experience, higher education moves towards wider use of online and hybrid delivery it is more important than ever to understand how previous diverse digital and campus experiences may shape student transition to, and success across, multiple modes of delivery.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tran Le Huu Nghia, Sarah Lambert and Kevin Dullaghan for research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported with funding from Deakin University.