It is widely believed that technology is enabling students to engage with their education in new and innovative ways, both inside and outside the formal learning environment. However, many e-learning interventions do little to change existing classroom practice. Moreover, when practices do change, we currently have little evidence about the ways in which individual students manage their access to materials outside the classroom, or the meanings they ascribe to their engagement with online resources.

This problem is contextualised in relation to literature on the politics surrounding the strategic ‘push’ to e-learning. Issues such as deficit conceptions of widening participation, exclusion and surveillance are identified. The paper builds on this review with a study of students who are engaging with the curriculum in the online environment but are failing to take advantage of face-to-face class contact time. This is achieved using a set of Biographic Narrative Interpretative Method (BNIM) case studies. This method generates narratives about students’ actions — or lack of them — in terms that are meaningful to them.

The paper concludes by arguing that technology is not ‘permitting’ students to take their work home so much as requiring them to do so. This has changed how students engage in education, but in a way that complicates the process rather than improves it. As the cases here reveal, students may have to struggle to create a context in which they can learn successfully — and this applies just as readily to learning online as it does to classroom study.