Abstract:

Adult learners’ time is delimited by family, work and social activities that could be in competition between them. Considering this potential time allocation conflicts, work-life balance aims to find the “balance work and leisure/family activities” (Bratton & Gold, 2003). The current need for permanent knowledge update and the spread of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have promoted the life long learning (LLL) among adults. Therefore, the learning activity is a new temporal pattern to integrate in their lifes. Time spent in academic processes could be a source of conflicts for long life learners because of the introduction of a third time to the work-life balance -the academic or learning time- added to the professional and social/family temporal patterns. For this reason, we introduce the concept of work-life learning balance (WLLB) to refer to the balance of the professional, family and academic activities. We introduce in this paper the implications of the WLLB for students’ enrolled in distance education that implies the relationship between individual/social temporalities and the external/internal regulation factors. We observe that in distance learning situations, the temporal flexibility implies a higher requirement of students’ time regulation competencies, concerning both the planning and regulation of the academic time-on-task and the ability to maintain the activity focus in a context of increasing temporal permeability between work, family/social life, academic activities and multitasking.

Keywords:

Work-life balance, work-life learning balance, e-learning, CSCL, e-learning quality, time flexibility, time use, time-on-task, time quality, learner’ time.