The Consequences of ‘Flexitime’
Drawing on narratives from administrators, instructors, and students involved in the development and experience of online education at a UK university, this paper assesses the notion of flexibility in higher education. The author discusses how the increasing demand for ‘flexibility’ and ‘agility’ in the workplace is reflected in the institution. The author further explores subsequent implications for well-being, where students and instructors find themselves sacrificing sleep, and personal and social time in response to increased demands associated with ‘flexitime’.
Reference:
Sheail, P. (2018). Temporal flexibility in the digital university: Full-time, part-time, flexitime. Distance Education, 39(4), 462–479. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2018.1520039
What is this research about?
The author defines ‘flexible capitalism’ as the workforce expectation for employees to be available to work wherever, whenever, as work products become less concrete and more abstract and computerized. The ideal worker is agreeable to last-minute changes and is less dependent on routine and regulations. Nowadays, ‘being flexible’ is an ideal characteristic of the worker and therefore, an ideal characteristic of the employable university graduate.
With online programming already on the rise prior to COVID-19, higher education is better positioned to offer a variety of customizable educational paths to fit within the complex lives of students, particularly those balancing work and study. Higher education institutions and their graduates are increasingly expected to be ‘agile’ and ‘flexible’ without considering the downsides. The promise of flexibility granting freedom seems to result in the opposite outcome of overpacked, rigid timetables, where ‘full-time’ moves increasingly away from the conventional weekday 9-5 and toward an entire 24h cycle.
The author suggests we should continue to question and critique increasingly flexible experiences of higher education by all parties involved. The author further argues that time is a concrete and limited quantity in which our individual lives play out within specific social, political and economic contexts.
What did the researchers do?
The article is based on a three-year effort by a UK university to expand and evaluate their online offerings to distance and part-time students as a long-term institutional goal. Over two years, 29 interviews were conducted with the administrators/management of the initiative or the academics/technical course developers. 7 interviews were conducted with distance postgraduate students enrolled in one of 3 online courses. Transcripts were coded by various themes, particularly focusing on references to temporality and personal flexibility associated with online education.
What did the researchers find?
The researchers found different perspectives across administration, instructors/course developers, and students around how a shift in focus towards online distance education affected the temporal and spatial aspects of post-secondary education. Thematic analysis focused on a “three-dimensional narrative inquiry space” with temporality along one dimension, personal/social interactions along another and notion of place along the third dimension.
Administration gave the following reasons to focus more on online learning:
- Catering more to part-time and distance students allows the institution to reach an international market and “diversify income streams.”
- They believe that technology can facilitate a higher-quality learning experience and overcome the limitations of everyday physical time and space.
- An overall aim is to adapt higher education processes to the changing demands of the professional market.
Instructors and course developers directly involved in creating and delivering online content were primarily concerned with two points:
- First, striking a balance between providing enough options for flexibility and building in enough time to encourage sufficiently deep study for part-time/distance students.
- Second, the notion of flexibility in timetabling may lead students to underestimate the amount of time needed for sufficient engagement with content. However, students eventually discover “the difference between what [they] think they can do and what they can actually do”.
Part-time/distance students raised the following points:
- They tended to view flexibility favourably, both in the context of online course delivery and as a desirable personal characteristic to exhibit, in line with how they regard time management and commitment.
- Students viewed simultaneous work and study as the only affordable route to obtaining further education, but there was a clear prioritization of work schedules (prevailingly inflexible) over the perceived importance of time needed to study.
- They tended not to refer to the physical limitations of time; one student detailed getting up at 4:30am to study before a 9-12 hour workday and studying more on evenings and weekends but did not identify lack of time as a barrier to online learning at all.
How can you use this research?
Rather than focusing on concrete teaching recommendations, the author aims to give the reader pause (pun intended) in considering the consequences of being increasingly flexible and perhaps overly malleable to the demands of the market and workforce, whose expectations and requirements remain rigid. Whereas we have been able to transcend spatial constraints with the sweeping move of higher education to the Internet, it remains impossible to add physical time to our days.
In the current context of the pandemic, we might further ask ourselves how efforts to become increasingly flexible teachers and learners might conflict with increased caregiving responsibilities, financial stresses and precarious employment. How can we maintain our professional and personal boundaries against market pressures to become “better and faster” learners and workers?
Authors:
Philippa Sheail is a Lecturer in Digital Education and a member of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburg (Edinburgh, UK).
Reference:
Sheail, P. (2018). Temporal flexibility in the digital university: Full-time, part-time, flexitime. Distance Education, 39(4), 462–479. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2018.1520039