Temporal Flexibility in Online University Courses in Spain and Australia

Abstract

Temporal flexibility in learning is one of the main promises and advantages of online learning, as well as one of its most important characteristics. This advantage has been widely exploited by institutions, which offer several degrees online or constitute themselves fully online. Although it is clear that online university courses are able to be more flexible in time than face-to-face courses, it is also true that as formal educational institutions with accreditation responsibilities universities face some time constraints that prevent them from being absolutely flexible. In this chapter, the authors present a study to assess the levels of time flexibility of online courses in two universities in Spain and Australia. To do so, they administrated a Likert-scale questionnaire to 413 students at both universities to assess seven items of time flexibility. The results suggest that in both universities some items of time flexibility are quite high but other items are still low. The authors then discuss these results from the point of view of the nature of higher education institutions and their current role in society.