“Any Time, Any Place”: The Myth of Universal Access and the Semiprivate Space of Online Education

The rhetoric surrounding distance education emphasizes that it allows students to complete courses in an abstract “any time,” and thus improves access to higher education. This essay critiques that discourse and argues that teachers and scholars need to build critical consideration of students’ lived negotiations of time into the work of online courses. Social media provide a useful site for this work: students can mark the time of the course and critically reflect on their experience of the course's location in public or private space. Using Ellen Rooney's concept of the semiprivate, the essay theorizes how students in one first-year composition course described, on social media, the time and space of the online course. While the policy discourse surrounding online education imagines that its neutral relationship to time is a way to create universal access to higher education, the concept of the semiprivate emphasizes costs and barriers that are generated as students struggle to fit online courses into the specific realities of their lives.