A private revolution: how technology is enabling students to take their work home

Dr Debbie Holley, London Metropolitan University
d.holley@londonmet.ac.uk

Dr Martin Oliver, Institute of Education
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk

The authors

Dr Debbie Holley is principal lecturer at London Metropolitan Business School and a university teaching fellow. She has a part-time secondment to the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Reusable Learning Objects (www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk). Her research interests are engaging students within a blended learning curriculum, student e-portfolio developments and the use of Web 2.0.

Dr Martin Oliver is a reader in the Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy at the Institute of Education. His research interests include the impact of new technology on roles and practices within higher education (including how this changes what students learn and do), evaluating ICT use and the development of theory and methodologies in the field of e-learning.

Abstract

It is widely believed that technology is enabling students to engage with their education in new and innovative ways, both inside and outside the formal learning environment. However, many e-learning interventions do little to change existing classroom practice. Moreover, when practices do change, we currently have little evidence about the ways in which individual students manage their access to materials outside the classroom, or the meanings they ascribe to their engagement with online resources.This problem is contextualised in relation to literature on the politics surrounding the strategic ‘push’ to e-learning. Issues such as deficit conceptions of widening participation, exclusion and surveillance are identified. The paper builds on this review with a study of students who are engaging with the curriculum in the online environment but are failing to take advantage of face-to-face class contact time. This is achieved using a set of Biographic Narrative Interpretative Method (BNIM) case studies. This method generates narratives about students’ actions – or lack of them – in terms that are meaningful to them.The paper concludes by arguing that technology is not ‘permitting’ students to take their work home so much as requiring them to do so. This has changed how students engage in education, but in a way that complicates the process rather than improves it. As the cases here reveal, students may have to struggle to create a context in which they can learn successfully – and this applies just as readily to learning online as it does to classroom study.

Keywords

BNIM research method, pedagogical Issues, evaluation methodology

Introduction

This paper sets out to seek a richer understanding of the student experience outside the classroom using a phenomenological approach, where the meaning of the lived experiences for individuals about a concept or phenomenon is explored (Cresswell, 1998: 51). Weighed down by shorter teaching semesters, overwhelming assessment and under-resourced staff, technology is not disrupting learning in ways that are overt – instead, our research indicates that individual students have to renegotiate their own private learning spaces. It is here that the disruption is occurring, not ‘out there’ in the formal domain but ‘in here’ in the informal learning space, and sometimes learning is happening in spite, rather than because of, technology.

Literature review

The political context

Our analysis starts with reference to a speech made by David Blunkett, when he was secretary of state for education, at Greenwich University in 2000, where he firmly positions e-learning and the needs of ‘UK plc’ within a globalised economy. The increasing political intervention in higher education was justified from a governmental perspective as meeting the needs of a global ‘knowledge economy’ (Hodge, 2002), enabling the UK to compete within the international trading environment:

'The powerhouses of the new global economy are innovation and ideas, skills and knowledge. These are now the tools for success and prosperity as much as natural resources and physical labour power were in the past century. Higher education is at the centre of these developments. Across the world, its shape, structure and purposes are undergoing transformation because of globalisation … World class higher education ensures that countries can grow and sustain high-skill businesses, and attract and retain the most highly-skilled people … It is therefore at the heart of the productive capacity of the new economy and the prosperity of our democracy.'
David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education, Speech at Greenwich University, 15 February 2000 (http://cms1.gre.ac.uk)

In the UK, the use of central funding to promote a competitive and expansionist market in further and higher education has already radically altered the culture of many institutions. Governmental policies that were intended to enhance the quality of higher education have added to a process of centralisation initiated by Margaret Thatcher from 1979 (see Sinfield et al., 2004; Burns et al., 2006). In particular, pedagogy, once purely the concern of the academics directly involved in course delivery, has now become an issue for strategy. Smith (2005: 104-5) comments:

'Politicisation and systemisation of e-learning appears endemic, as policy and funding pursue large scale development to harness potential in this area. For those in the field, Blunkett’s speech had some daunting overtones, ‘big business’, ‘big aspirations’, ‘well rehearsed’ in relation to the national and global benefits of e-learning.'

Thus we can see that government views central control over e-learning as a key strategic initiative in moving ‘UK plc’ forward in the competitive global economy. Conole, Smith and White (2006) suggest the most important policy report of the ‘new labour era’ phase of e-learning development was the Dearing Report (NCIHE, 1997). This report set the main macro-policy context within which further government policies were situated. It was the culmination of a systematic review of higher education, and made a series of recommendations which have influenced the focus and direction of many ICT projects. The report included an appendix examining new approaches to teaching and the associated cost structure of teaching methods. The document is significant as it explores a rationale for enhancing the student experience through the use of resource-based learning, set within the framework of the unit cost per student – as student numbers increase, the cost per student falls and the total cost stays within public spending constraints (Dearing, 1997: Appendix 2). The economic model of unit costs takes pedagogy away from the expert tutor, the subject specialist, and places it firmly in the hands of management. The report authors all seem of the view that the ‘radical’ changes they propose will be positive, and this is consonant with later government pronouncements ostensibly seeking imaginative approaches to funding ‘to invigorate the e-learning market, address the gaps and quality of e-learning content, and drive pedagogic innovation’ (www.dfes.gov.uk/2005). Such assumptions have, however, been shown to be over-simplistic (for example, Clegg et al., 2003).

However, there has been no apparent acknowledgement of the changes brought about by widening participation, or that learners are no longer a homogenous group of privileged middle-class 18-year-olds drawn from the top 7 per cent of homes but are globally recruited from a competitive marketplace. Indeed, rather than the fresh thinking that such a student body might propel, the choice of measures utilised to engage this diverse group is increasingly made by management (or at least passed on from funding councils via management), embedded in strategies and regulated by quality assurance procedures (Holley et al., 2006). This so-called agenda of ‘modernisation’ for higher education could be seen in turn as being part of a wider debate around performance and quality, where performance indicators provide management with both a technology and a ‘rational’ justification for exerting increased bureaucratic control (Kirkpatrick and Lucio,1995).

Pedagogic implications of policy

With pedagogic choice becoming a matter of strategy rather than tactics, the choice of teaching techniques becomes a matter of serving functional agendas of efficiency (more students equals cheaper – see, for example, Smith and Oliver, 2002). Noble’s argument (2001:3) about the commodification of education – ‘educational experience that has been disintegrated and distilled into discrete, reified, and ultimately saleable things or packages of things’ – now warrants reconsideration. This move is typically framed as being student-centred, in that a modular offering involving e-learning is expected to bring flexibility, allowing a broader range of students to engage in education in a flexible manner.

In spite of a growing rhetoric about independent and autonomous learners (Thorpe, 2002), we have no confidence that our students know how to learn best. Instead, we offer them modularisation and centralisation. When students engage with these offerings, there is no trust in their ability to complete them, leading to regimes of surveillance (Land and Bayne, 2002) and a deep-rooted suspicion that they will cheat. The fear of plagiarism has led to widespread electronic analyses of work that attempt, with only mixed success, to catch plagiarists (Evans, 2004).

The rhetoric of personalisation and student-centredness constructs the individual learner primarily in the deficit, as having individual needs requiring individual support, and this personalisation hides and denies that whole groups and classes of people have been excluded from education because of their class or group position – not because of individual flaws or lack of aspiration (Burns et al., 2006). Arguably, rather than education as an ineffable and somewhat unknowable transcendental experience (Noble, 2001; Satterthwaite, 2004), involving creativity, trust and communication, we have implicitly transgressive students corralled by implicitly transgressive staff (Sinfield et al., 2004).

Students’ experiences of e-learning

The focus of the literature thus far has been from the perspective of the institution and the teacher. The students’ experiences of e-learning have been relatively neglected (Sharpe et al., 2006). The few studies that have explored students’ engagement with technology and education show a complex picture: that shaped by social and cultural influences and full of distractions (for example, Crook, 2002), a far cry from the simple promise of access to consumable courses promised in the Dearing Report. The C-SAP e-Learning Scoping Study (2008: 14) provides an insight into staff perceptions of personalising learning for students and, as a focus group member points out:

'A sophisticated ‘personalised’ system of e-learning would not obviate the need for students to engage thoroughly with the materials, in whatever form; porting classes into Facebook might be novel, but would not guarantee further engagement with learning on the part of the students.'

This contrasts with the University of Dundee e-learning survey report of students, where 80 per cent of student respondents visited their virtual learning environment (VLE) at least twice a week and in focus groups students ‘stated the frequency of visiting was driven by expectations and the nature of specific teaching programme’ (Weyers et al., 2004: 7). However, Sharpe and Benfield (2004: 3) note that although many students report benefits to their wider experience through the use of e-learning, the typical e-learning interventions do little to change existing classroom practice. It is when e-learning adapts new or unusual pedagogies that things get more complicated, and ‘here learners report an intensely emotional experience and a major concern with time and time management’ (Sharpe and Benfield, 2004). As yet, we don’t really understand the ways in which individual students manage their access to a range of online materials outside the classroom and the meanings they ascribe to their engagement with online resources.

Although there is considerable interest in the notion of context, very little research seems to be done on the simpler idea of ‘space’. This is not a widely discussed topic in the educational literature, and much of what has been written tends to be in related fields, suggesting ways in which space can be physically conceptualised. Thus, for example, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) produced a glossy brochure that focuses on the design of spaces within educational institutions that ‘become a physical representation of the institution’s vision and strategy for learning’ (JISC, 2006). There are some underpinning concepts that need to be reviewed when considering how students engage with their own ‘learning space’ (Holley, 2008). This raises questions about how ‘free’ a space can be when students are monitored, tracked and highly visible to their tutors.

A useful start to conceptualising student space is to identify where space is available within current pedagogic practice. A study by Oliver and Shaw (2003) explored the relatively neglected area of curriculum design practices with academic staff. The research suggested that curriculum design tended to be themed as a series of expanding academic considerations, starting sequentially from an absence of design, to content considerations, to the planning stage, and finally to the process of integrating the whole into the organisation. A separate theme relating to this process of curriculum design was also identified in the Oliver paper, namely the ‘lived curriculum’, which was elaborated as a need for a ‘creative space’ – areas that were not planned, in which teachers and students would feel able to try things out and negotiate what should be done. Significantly, it was ‘felt that this space should be enjoyable and … respectful to and encouraging of students’ (Oliver and Shaw, 2003: 5). Thus a space was identified within which students were able to move freely, and academics felt that there was a need to protect this spontaneous open space from the formal, planned curriculum. What actually happens in these spaces that are left out of the curriculum? Or is this a much more liberating space away from what Land and Bayne (2002: 7) call ‘extensive tracking tools’?

However, none of this work has explored the detail of how specific students work with technology to manage their studies from their external environment. It is this neglected area that will be explored through the subsequent case studies.

Method

Recognising the complexity of the politics impacting on our students and their experiences, the tradition within which we will frame the work is the phenomenological approach, where the meaning of the lived experiences for individuals about a concept or phenomenon is explored (Cresswell,1998: 51). Exploring the individual experience of learning outside the formal classroom environment has led researchers to call for new types of study to be undertaken – ones that explore people’s patterns of use and seek to understand them (for example, Selwyn, 2004; Potter, 2006). Biographic Narrative Interpretative Method (BNIM) fits within this tradition. It is used to draw out the ‘stories’ or narratives from interviewees’ lives (Wengraf, 2001). What is of interest to the researcher is what the interviewee selects to tell us, and the way in which the story is told. One advantage of this approach, Wengraf suggests, is that it limits counter-transference, which is the emotional reaction of the interviewer to the interviewee’s subject matter. The BNIM has a key advantage for interviewing participants known to the interviewer as it can, in part, address issues of power relationships.

The context of the study

The context for this study is a metropolitan university in the UK. It has a diverse student intake and two-thirds of the student population are mature learners. Many have English as a second language. A high proportion of mature learners change the typical learning dynamic as the students very often attend lectures only. The informal learning that takes place on a more residential campus where students are present for more of their time is missing at this university. Research by Pheiffer et al. (2003) showed that, by week 11 of their semester, only 19 per cent of year 1 students had joined a student society and only 44 per cent had attended a social event at the university. The students experience financial hardship and many are trying to combine full-time study with nearly full-time work, with an average of 15 working hours per week (Holley and Dobson, 2008).

The course is a specialist honours-level module on an International Business degree. Historically, it had a high failure rate, and the first author redesigned the module, making full use of Blackboard, the university VLE. Weekly interactive online discussions were implemented, and students were encouraged to engage with an ethical discussion running for three weeks around the use of labour in developing country factories supplying UK chain stores. The tracking tools enabled the monitoring of student access and activity within the VLE.

Selection of participants

The BNIM approach recommends the selection and analysis of three interviews. If two people are selected, there is a tendency to compare and stereotype; by adding a third person, the analysis is much richer (Wengraf, 2001). The three students comprising the case study were Nyela, a refugee from Somalia, Marco, an Italian student studying in the UK and working hard to finance his studies, and Richard, a student studying for his professional examinations on a part-time basis at the university. (All names are pseudonyms.)

Students were placed in a sampling framework as follows:

Quadrant A Students engaging online, and engaging face-to-face	Quadrant B Students engaging online but not engaging face-to-face Nyela, Marco, Richard
Quadrant C Students not engaging online, but engaging face-to-face	Quadrant D Students not engaging online, and not engaging face-to-face

For this study, an exploration of students’ behaviour outside the classroom was of significance and thus three students from Quadrant B were selected for interview. The narratives from these students can offer insights into their attitudes towards both the classroom and their silence in this space, and a contrast with their use of technology outside the classroom in their own space. Richard studied the whole module course virtually, on a distance-learning basis, and so had no experience of face-to-face tuition. Marco attended the class regularly, made very little contribution in the classroom debates and discussions but was very confident in emailing to clarify points subsequently. Nyela attended the classes infrequently and was almost invisible when she was there, sitting apart from others in a back corner of the class.

Ethical considerations

All 26 students were invited to take part in an interview and 11 students participated. Each interview took place in the author’s office (the author was also the lecturer on the module) at a time that suited the student. Interviews took between 40 minutes and an hour. All students signed an informed consent form, which had been derived from the BERA ethical guidelines (www.bera.ac.uk/ethical). This explained the study and made it clear that interviews could be stopped at any point; if this action was taken, the student was welcome to leave and take their tape-recording with them. All references to students in future work would involve pseudonyms, the original named transcription would be held only on the author’s home PC and, finally, all tape-recordings would be destroyed at the end of the project. Talking through the ethical guidelines before the interview commenced acted as a powerful agent in ‘settling’ the individual into the interview space, and one student commented that knowing they could leave at any time helped them stay and take part.

Case Study 1: Nyela – home comforts

A refugee from Somalia, Nyela starts her narration by talking about how hard she has found the move to the UK both in terms of social and educational integration:

'You know, when you can’t speak the language it’s even harder for you to actually go down the high street or buy certain products, let alone start school, and then not only start making friends with people you’ve never met in your entire life and completely different people to you, it’s harder to learn at the same time.'

Her story is one of difficulties – with making friends, with settling into a different education system, with not having the familiar extended family support network around her. Her very expressive language shows how hard she has worked to learn English as a foreign language, and she is able to use tone and intonation to convey the depth of her feelings. Her selection of words ‘even harder’ and ‘you’ve never met in your entire life’ hint at the resistance she has come across when trying to adapt to and enter a new community. It is significant that Nyela has chosen to start her narrative from her childhood experiences of first entering the UK.

Nyela explains how she sees studying at university by referring back to her secondary school, where she says:

'I just wanted to be invisible and to go into class and just see what it would be like to just sit there. So it would be nice for them to actually get an overview of what the place would be like, what the food is like, what the people are like.'

There is a sense that she wants to find out what the ‘norms’ of a learning situation are before she exposes herself to it. This would help her to blend in when she arrives, to sort out in her head how things should be. Being a visitor first would help her understand the rules. She relates this to a university induction:

'Maybe it would be nice if the students actually came in and look around the university without someone guiding them going this is this room etc. Somewhere they could just have an overview of what their days may be like if they do go to the university.'

We start to get an idea of how these kinds of pre-entry experiences would be useful when we explore further how Nyela negotiates spaces in other aspects of her life. In the following extract, we contrast the use Nyela makes of spaces – both virtual space and physical space. In both sets of circumstances, she feels she must learn how to negotiate use of the spaces in order to gain some control over the context for study. When this is achieved, she feels the conditions to work well are set up.

The physical space is evidenced through narratives about the technology at home, which is clearly an important part of Nyela’s approach to study. It is of great importance to her family, as a means of accessing educational resources, and equally important is the location of the PC, in the home, where Nyela has the support of her family. She is very proud that she has bought a computer and beams when she explains that she has acquired this with her first pay cheque.

'It’s because I always wanted something that was mine and, you know, when you’re working and you buy something with your first pay cheque, that computer, I felt kind of good. I felt like I was working, old enough, I’d bought something to the family, so it was something that I also did for them, as well as for me. So it was something kind of precious. It was something that I did for myself and for the rest of the family.'

Here we can see that her economic capital as a worker is paying back the social capital to her family, and she is delighted that she can contribute to the family in this way (Bourdieu, 1986). Nyela shares a house with her mother, brother and sister. She says, ‘We don’t have much room at home’, and she is grateful that her sister shares a room with her mum: ‘She doesn’t sleep with me.’ The computer is in her bedroom, and access is negotiated to suit all the family members: ‘So we work our way around it, it’s not really hard.’ Her sister uses it before Nyela comes in from college, and ‘my brother, he actually just surfs the net, normally when we’re out. He’s at college as well.’

Nyela has negotiated the space to access the technology. Although it is ‘her’ computer, she sees the wider implications of technology as a key part of studying, and she wants her brother and sister to share in the experiences. She retains control through the PC being in her room, so she can control the environment. She does have to compromise, but for her the compromise is viable, involving strictly segregated access.

The ‘virtual’ space is evident as Nyela goes on to discuss the course in some detail. In her narrative there is a sense of an overwhelming space – the course is too vast for her to comprehend and she is seeking a guide through both the formal and informal learning on offer. She reverts to time-management skills to map out and gain control of the space and applies her IT knowledge to sequence the learning.

Learning is a key objective. It does not matter how hard it is to ‘learn’; Nyela will endeavour to do this. As her narrative develops into describing her university experiences, we can trace her determination to ‘learn’ from her childhood experiences. Unfamiliarity with places, people and events has enabled Nyela to develop successful strategies for overcoming barriers in her own way, as we can see from the next extract:

'But now I think it probably has something to do with the more you grow up the more you learn and everything else, but I feel more comfortable with myself to actually go about learning a certain subject, managing my own time and then gradually, bit by bit, go and force myself to overstress myself but gradually learning bit by bit.'

She talks about forcing herself to overcome the stress of learning, and is starting to develop strategies to cope – managing her own time and space is important because having small steps works for her. Her aim of developing ‘learning’ is being achieved.

However, the difficulties remain with Nyela in terms of making friends and starting to be, as she puts it, grown up. She would prefer to talk things through with peers rather than ringing her mum at home:

'I think the sooner that you know certain people within your group, the better. It’s because they can be your support at uni so if things go horribly wrong, instead of ringing your mum or your friend back home, you can ring them and talk to them. Having friends in university life would be great.'

It is clear that her aim of having friends at university has not yet been achieved, and the pressure of study and time for friendship is an issue. There is a sense of not having achieved this social capital, and the next extract suggests a reason why this is the case – Nyela is prioritising personal capital:

'It’s still a bit difficult to find friends at uni. On top of that, getting to know people while you are trying to get an essay in on time is extremely hard.'

Thus, for Nyela, being able to study is something that follows from a feeling of knowing how to use a particular space for learning. She has struggled to learn how to use several different spaces – classrooms, home, the online environment. It is her approach of compartmentalising spaces that has enabled her to overcome her initial difficulties and to engage successfully in education.

Case Study 2: Marco – giving up sleep to manage his study space

Marco is an Italian student who came to London for what he describes as ‘a new experience, new challenge’. He has held down a number of jobs (office administration in Italy, hotel and bar work in London) and also studied to gain the ticketing qualifications needed to work in a travel agency. He is used to combining work and study, and is keen to attain his degree in England as this holds a high status back home.

His interview characterises him as a man seeking new opportunities, who is willing to take risks with his career and education and to gradually find a role that he is comfortable with. The extract below illustrates his ethos:

'Marketing was one of those subjects that I wanted to study, so I said I can start and see if I like it and I will stay or change in the next semester. I started this new challenge.'

He took opportunities as they came along. For example, before starting at the university, he attended an open evening, accepted the offer of a place and started studying a degree within two weeks: ‘So I just went for it and see if I like it or not.’

Time management is an issue for him, as he has to continue to work to fund his studies. He is unable to spend time on the university premises to study. He prefers to study in his flat, where his flatmate also works shifts, so there is peace and quiet. He is very good at prioritising his work. When he finishes his shifts in the bar, he can use the internet there and so regularly logs on and works between 1am and 3am. His manager is keen for him to progress and allows him to use the internet if there are any quiet periods during his shifts and also after the shift ends at 1am.

Marco does not see himself as a typical student; this is partly because of his part-time work. He prefers the peace and quiet of his home to study. Student areas of the university are noisy: ‘I don’t like to study with the TV or music on.’ His home space offers a contrast to the general busyness and noise elsewhere in his life. The home space also gives him an environment he can control to enable him to maximise his study effectiveness. His patterns of study, either in the quiet at work after the bar has closed or late afternoon, indicate the discipline of study on a regular basis.

Part of the assessment for his course is group work. He is asked how he manages to fit this in along with the needs of a full-time job. Marco negotiates his time by maximising the use of online space. He says:

'We share the phone number and we share the email but this is mostly by email that we exchange information or we give deadlines to each other. For example, we know by Thursday we have to do some part of the report. So the phone is still not used yet but the email, yes, it’s used a lot.'

When asked about whether it is the university email account or an individual one, he comments: ‘We never use it, we just use the personal one.’ As a mature learner, Marco prefers to be totally independent of the university, and it is suggested that others in his group take this approach as well.

When questioned about the potential use of mobile technology to keep students in touch with the course, Marco says he would find this intrusive. He says:

'Yes, because it’s something, I think it’s something personal, and studying or working is something separate from my private life. So I don’t want the university to get into it. I don’t really feel comfortable with it. If I see a text message from the university I’m not really happy about it.'

The above quote illustrates how Marco compartmentalises the different aspects of his life, and how he wants to manage his life on his own terms. He is prepared to work anti-social hours to earn the money to study, and to study at anti-social hours to keep up-to-date with his study, but he wants to manage his own life and deal with any issues arising at a time that suits him. The following extract shows how he would perceive any university communications:

'Maybe because the technology at 3am, I chose to look at it. I can control it, when to look at it, but the phone that the text message can come at any time and I cannot control that.'

Thus, Marco is keen to use technology at the place and time of his choosing, and he wants to keep the university side of his life separate from the rest of his life. He manages a combination of work and study by strictly controlling the impact of his study within regular periods when he has carved out the space, either in his preferred location of home or the post-work period when there is quiet in the office behind the bar. He is blocking out time to create space and giving up sleep to enable him to continue to pursue his aims of a degree while living in London and earning his own living.

Case Study 3: Richard – power, privilege and personal space

Richard is a white, middle-class student in his early thirties, and a feature of this analysis is his strong identity of self. In his interview, he presented himself as confident in his abilities, both as a worker and as a student, and in his ability to transfer skills from one arena to the other. In terms of negotiating his own time and space to study, he is prepared to work hard and effectively in the comfort of his own home, where he can shut out the world. Middle-class values of deferred gratification and the commercial values of the professional in industry can explain in part his determination to succeed and his view of the educational process as a series of tasks to be undertaken. His language reflects neo-liberal notions of success and reward of the individual; for example, a key feature of his narrative was a constant comparison of himself with other learners, placing himself in the ‘top 10 per cent’ of the classroom. He uses terms that classify the other students in his class by ‘success’ or ‘failure’ on a sliding scale. For example, when talking about forming online groups for an assessment, he comments, ‘Then the lower end of the group would be excluded from that I think.’ Given the tone and expression of voice, this meant that the students he would place at the lower end would not be capable of forming an online group. He is satisfied with his own group, because ‘the top 10 per cent would be able to form themselves into sensible groups who could work together’.

He is aware of his privileged position, and explains that he is at a little bit of advantage because he is working and has the money to buy text books ‘even when they’re not essential’. There is a sense of privilege from the resources Richard has access to in his home environment, and privilege is a re-occurring theme.

Richard can be described as an independent learner as he shows confidence in approaching the teaching/learning materials on his own. He displays ‘white, middle-class’ self-assurance in his abilities to negotiate an alternative teaching mode with the lecturer that is not available ‘by strictly following rules’. He displays independent learning characteristics through minimal contact with the lecturer – only checking when there is a query he is concerned about (queries were mainly to do with how high marks could be gained for the module assessment). He knows that there is untapped support from the lecturer should this be needed. This approach suggests an economy of effort, which reflects the business world in which Richard operates. He has high expectations himself and is intolerant of others. Below he talks about the value of face-to-face teaching compared with self-study:

'In terms of face-to-face time, for me, it’s not so important. I can spend an hour at a computer or an hour in a lecture but the hour I spend in front of the computer will probably cover about five to six weeks’ worth of material.'

He is able to draw upon his work experience to ensure he is able to gain the high grades he considers he deserves. Richard sees value in setting goals and working hard to achieve these. He uses ‘hard’ commercial skills that would be valued in the workplace in his studies. He can be seen to be self-assertive and elitist in his approach to learning, as his comments below illustrate:

'The use of technology will be more advantageous for those who are able to use the technology to their advantage. I know it sounds a bit like an obvious thing, but I think to only use technology to deliver a course would not work very well for the lower end of a particular group and I think the disadvantage for the middle ground unless they were effectively managed by an outside influence such as the tutor. I don’t think you can just bang everything online and say, there you go.'

Materially, Richard has a settled environment within which to study. He has access to a laptop computer. There is a feeling of physical space where notes can be spread out ‘as far as you can see’. He feels free to make a mess at home. Internet access is also evident, and Richard feels no need to work in an IT room at university, nor a quiet study area designated for student writing.

Later in the interview, Richard talks about how he works independently. There are clues to a privileged existence, which may be very different to that of other interviewees. His educational needs almost colonise his home life in terms of time and space. Here we have an example:

'When you’re at home, you just get home from work, sit down and say this is where I need to be by the end of tonight, and you just sit down and you do it until it’s done, and if it takes an hour or it takes to four in the morning, depending how close your deadlines are, then that’s what you do and you just get down and focus and you can block the rest of the world out.'

University space is definitely not of equal value to Richard. He comments:

'Whereas in the university, the IT rooms are generally … quite noisy and there’s no space to spread out and I’m a very messy worker. I sit there with my laptop in front of me and there’s paper as far as you can see, in every direction.'

His use of home space and time means that he is able to set his own parameters for study. He also has all the necessary resources to assist him. He fails to acknowledge, however, that his ease of study is enabled by a scaffolded learning approach designed by the tutor.

There is no evidence in Richard’s narratives that home space has to be negotiated, and he is able to use his time to meet his own needs first. There is no evidence of a partner or family sharing this space, and it is noticeable in the transcript of the interview that Richard only talks about work and study, and these concerns frame the world that he constructs. Family and friends of Richard possibly share his values, as there are no concerns expressed about having free time to work on his studies. There is a sense of privilege that echoes back to his perceptions of his power, arising from experience in the commercial sector that he feels is more important than the experiences other students had brought to the course.

Discussion

The three cases here show how complex the process of engaging with education is for students. The promised flexibility is not a simple function of the technology; although the course has been re-designed in a modular manner, students have to find their own ways to engage with it. Thus the ‘flexibility’ arises from their negotiation of social constraints rather than being an inherent property of the technology. In all three cases, the students needed to be flexible in some aspect of their home or work life in order to make time and space to study.

Nyela creates her space at home, one that is negotiated with her family. Importantly for her, the space has been negotiated – it no longer needs to go on being negotiated. Having negotiated it once, she has taken control of it, and can now get on with using the space for learning. She has also found a way to use the classroom to learn, but this has been a struggle for her and has involved carving up the overwhelming space of the course into manageable chunks. Her access to technology has been created at personal expense – for her, the online nature of the course was a barrier to be overcome. It required financial expense, and she remains vague about how she works online, suggesting that this part of the educational experience may still require work for her.

Marco is unable to fit in all his commitments, so he blocks out time to give him study space. He does not have to negotiate the social spaces around technology in the same way as Nyela; no family shares his technological access. Rather than working hard to master particular spaces like Nyela, he presents himself as being an opportunist. He knows that he will have to learn in certain ways (for example, through online access) and takes what opportunities present themselves, such as studying in quiet moments at work. This is not to suggest that his engagement is easy, however. He is giving up sleep to study. Importantly, in his account, technology involves a negotiation (and segregation) between educational and social uses. He is wary of formal education intruding into his social uses of technology. Thus here, although technology has enabled flexible study, it is at a price and at the risk of losing control of what he sees as personal spaces.

Richard is giving up nothing. He already has control of all the spaces in which he needs to learn. If anything, he has more control than he needs. He feels able to neglect certain opportunities for learning (such as the open access computing facilities) because he knows he can use or create other opportunities for learning (for example, emailing the tutor when he has a problem – in other words, at a time to suit him, not the tutor). The system is allowing him to take full advantage of all the ‘good ‘ learning experiences while ‘bending the rules’, which enables him to succeed in his own terms (attaining excellent grades at the expense of others). It is not that technology has created any flexibility for him; his flexibility arises from already having a repertoire of spaces that he can use for learning, enabling him to pick those that best suit him at any moment.

Thus students’ struggles to engage with education have not been radically transformed by technology. Indeed, for Marco and Nyela, introducing technology created barriers – new negotiation was required to create a space in which this kind of learning could be undertaken. Both have found ways to study online, but this has required one-off expense and effort for Nyela and ongoing sacrifice for Marco. Richard, by contrast, is able to pick and choose how (and if) he uses technology because he already has a repertoire of alternative ways of learning that are sanctioned by the course and the tutor.

Conclusions

Technology is not ‘permitting’ students to take their work home so much as requiring them to do so. This has changed how students engage in education, but in a way that complicates the process rather than improves it. As the cases here reveal, students may have to struggle to create a context in which they can learn successfully – and this applies just as readily to learning online as it does to classroom study.

Introducing technology has not solved educational inequalities by providing flexibility and thus ensuring access for all. The privileged student in this study is now more privileged, if anything, because he now has even more choice about how to engage with his learning. The other two students have found ways to engage in this programme – and it is possible that, if the course were taught in a more conventional format, they may not have been able to do so. But unless this work is extended by following up with students who have been unsuccessful in their attempts to engage with education, it would be hard to argue such a position convincingly. However, now that a more detailed picture of students’ engagement has been provided, it may well prove productive to extend this by considering the efforts of those making unsuccessful attempts to take part in education in a similar manner.

Critical analysis of the policy agenda – from Lyotard through Noble to Burns et al. – reveals that policy when put into practice ‘must’ denature academic and student alike (Burns et al., 2006). When considered alongside the role of managers in managing pedagogy (Holley and Oliver, 2000), it should come as no surprise that the disadvantaged are further disadvantaged and the advantaged further privileged by e-learning developments. Indeed, rather than empowering the educationally disenfranchised, it is the stakeholder at the margins of society and education who continues to be silenced through the policies and practices of education and e-learning, whilst those with cultural, institutional and economic power continue to set the agenda (Burns et al., 2006).

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