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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]