Making space to study: student experiences of managing time and space in an Online MPhil/PhD

There is a growing awareness of the importance of initiatives to widen participation in doctoral education (mcCulloch & Thomas, 2013). A common approach to achieving this at undergraduate and taught postgraduate level has involved promoting flexible provision (Barnett, 2014). Within such discussions, spaces such as campuses are frequently framed as problems to be overcome, and technology as the solution – in spite of the fact that campuses, classrooms, libraries and so on remain an important part of most students’ experiences of higher Education (Oliver, 2015). The experiences of doctoral students are already ‘deterritorialised’, involving improvised sites of study (Barnacle & mewburn, 2010); how do doctoral students create the networks, spaces and infrastructure they need when doctoral programmes are increasingly decoupled from campus-based provision? In October 2014 the uCl Institute of Education launched an Online mPhil/PhD that enabled students to complete their studies without the need to attend at any point. In part, the motivation was to also provide resources for existing ‘face-to-face’ students many of whom nonetheless self-identified as distance learners, contradicting the institutional assumption that their learning took place exclusively on campus. In this paper we will present an analysis of data from a diverse group of students on the programme, using visual images and interviews, to understand how they have found or made spaces in which to study, used resources, managed their patterns of study, and interacted with their supervisors and doctoral colleagues. In doing so, we will consider what constitutes doctoral study in the 21st century. Building on these results and similar studies, we will discuss how institutions can best support all their students by appropriately configured infrastructure - wherever they are located on the continuum between exclusively online and notionally completely face-to-face.