Time, labor, and legitimacy: Examining the discourses of online learning in public university marketing

Abstract

When marketing online degrees, institutions are simultaneously telling a story about what it means to be a student at that institution and about what it means to be an online learner. This study is an attempt to investigate and interrogate those stories, to examine the discourses of online learning as marketed at public universities in the United States and to explore how those discourses expand on and/or contradict our understandings of academic capitalism in the 21st century. Using critical discourse analysis, I examined the institutional websites devoted to the promotion and marketing of online programs at 18 public universities with high exclusively online enrollment (>4,000). This project describes the consistencies and contradictions embedded in language and explores how dominant discourses reinforce and reconstitute broader social and lived realities of labor, time, and institutional legitimacy in higher education.