Tertiary students are spending less time on campus than ever before. With the help of changing technology they are increasingly logging on to learn. But are they the better for it?
MADDY Murphy is your typical university student. She commutes to Monash University from her parents' home up to four days a week and works up to 20 hours at a part-time job. On Mondays she forgoes a class so she can go to work and catches up by downloading a podcast of the lecture she missed.
A science/computer science student, Murphy is on campus more often than many of her friends, but she still does a lot of work at home using the university's online computer network. Her experience of university contrasts with that of her parents, who both attended Monash in the 1970s.
Her mother, Laurina, studied arts when university was free, and says the experience of her children is very different to her own.
She recalls a place that was particularly social, with all-day card games interrupted only for lectures, and late nights spent in the library stacks searching for material for essays and exams. ''You were locked in, you couldn't change at all. Your timetable was what it was and I was probably there every day,'' Laurina Murphy says. ''When you were doing research you were reliant on going to the library and you were reliant on borrowing books from the library and you were reliant on photocopying.''
These days students everywhere are logging on and listening to lectures at home; they're submitting essays through plagiarism filters that scan the electronic ether for matching phrases and paragraphs; they're downloading journal articles to their iPads instead of lugging around photocopies. In short, they're spending less time on campus and more time online.