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Generational generalisations regarding how students interact with technology have been used in recent times to prompt calls for radical changes to the delivery of teaching in higher education. This article reports on a study aimed to investigate first-year students' technology access and usage in two contexts of use: everyday life and academic study. A survey was delivered to first-year students across seven faculties of an Australian university during the second semester of the 2008 academic year. A total of 470 respondents met the criteria for this study. The findings suggest a wide diversity of usage of technologies with the usage rates of technology in academic study being generally lower than those in everyday life. These findings indicated that generational generalisations are not useful in informing the design of learning and teaching in higher education. However, there are questions regarding reliability of current survey-based methods to examine students' technology use and the level of diversity discovered across both contexts of use.This suggests that further in-depth research into how students shape technology to suit their lives is required to gain a greater understanding of how technology can effectively support teaching and learning.

Recent scholarly discussions about massive open online courses (MOOCs) highlight pedagogical and practical issues that separate MOOCs from other learning settings, especially how theories of learning translate to MOOC students' motivation, participation, and performance. What is missing from these discussions is the purpose of the MOOC. We report a comparative study of two MOOCs that differ in educational purpose, but are similar in design. Our sample consisted of 983 students in a professional development MOOC, and 648 students in a MOOC focused on general interest. We first report differences between the two MOOCs, in terms of student demographics, achievement motivation, and participation. For each MOOC, we ran a two-stage regression analysis to determine the extent to which motivation variables (stage 1) and participation variables (stage 2) predicted performance. Patterns in demographic background and motivation differed in ways that were consistent with the MOOCs' purposes. Motivation and participation predicted performance, but this relationship differed between the two MOOCs and reflected the patterns of participation. Professional development motivation contributed to final grade in the professional development MOOC, but not the general interest MOOC. The findings have implications for how MOOC designers think about their target audience, and for students who aim for high final grades.Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer people the opportunity to study a variety of courses for a variety of reasons, including personal interest, professional development, and social networking. Likewise, the MOOCs themselves vary in intended purpose, in terms of how designers intend their MOOC to serve the needs of prospective students, especially in addressing intrinsic goals (e.g., general interest), or extrinsic goals (e.g., professional development). Recent research has examined the relationship between MOOC students' motivation, participation, and performance (DeBoer, Kizilcec & Schneider, 2015;Milligan, Littlejohn, & Margaryan, 2013;Xiong et al., 2015). What is unclear is how MOOCs with different intended purposes might impact students' motivations and participation, and how these subsequently impact performance. Understanding this relationship has important pedagogical and practical implications for future MOOC success.In this paper, we report on a comparative study of two MOOCs that are similar in instructional design, in that they have similar learning environments (e.g., online platform, length of time, year) and use similar learning and instructional objects (e.g., discussion forums, video lectures, quizzes [Spector, Johnson, & Young, 2014]); but they differ in the designer's intended purpose. First, we briefly consider the emerging literature on MOOCs, paying particular attention to the varied purposes of MOOCs, student motivation and participation. We examine the differences between the two MOOCs, and outline how these differences are -and are not -reflected in the student demographics, achievement motiva...