Conceptions of Time in Educational Technology: Considerations for Equity-focused Design

Abstract

The adoption of technology-enhanced online learning platforms is transforming teaching and learning practices within and outside the university. As online learning and educational technology become increasingly ubiquitous, there is a need for equity-minded scholarship attending to the social, cultural, and political implications of the technology sustaining online learning. While prior literature has made important strides framing education technology within conversations of equity and justice, there is a lack of empirical research analyzing marketing material of education technology. This presents a significant gap in understanding for education researchers, as marketing material plays a significant role in shaping public perceptions of technology, and can be widely read among students, instructors, and university stakeholders before directly engaging with the tool. Given recent scholarly interest in the ways subjective understandings of temporality are implicated in learning design, the present study connects burgeoning interest in temporality towards corporate marketing material of learning design. Drawing on artifact analysis methods, we analyzed blog posts from Coursera and customer success stories from Microsoft that describe how their products are designed to support online learning. Our research questions include: (1) How does marketing material from two education technology companies shape subjective understandings of temporality in online learning? (2) How can these temporal representations be leveraged to promote equity-oriented pedagogical design? Results from our analysis show how time is constituted as an efficient and agentic resource, and as an orientation towards future careers. We discuss how these findings have implications for equity-oriented pedagogical design by linking conceptions of time to neoliberalism and humanization.