The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS)  promotes itself to be one of the main instruments to create the so-called European Higher Education Area (Berlin Communiqué, 2003, ECTS Guide, 2015). Drawing on an analysis of this instrument the  main objective of this paper is to focus on the kind of area that takes shape today, and to address specifically the kind of student that is supposed to move around in it.

ECTS was initiated as part of the Erasmus student exchange program in Europe (and introduced in 1989). The system’s objective was to make studying in Europe more transparent and to enable mobility of students across Europe by developing common standards for the transfer of learning outcomes while studying abroad. Meanwhile, the credit system is used by many institutions as a tool to re-organize their degree programs. ECTS allows to organize or reform programs as the accumulation of credits points that can be obtained through formal learning or based on learning outcomes obtained in non-formal and informal learning. The ECTS credit is defined as a “quantified means of expressing the volume of learning based on the workload students need in order to achieve the expected outcomes of a learning process at a specified level.” (ECTS Users Guide, 2015 p.35) It is argued that the student following ECTS based programmes should be regarded as a person having her own learning style, and in need of flexible trajectories to obtain the predefined learning outcomes. In the ECTS Users Guide, this student is baptized as the “independent learner”: “An independent learner may accumulate the credits required for the achievement of a qualification through a variety of learning modes. She/he may acquire the required knowledge, skills and competence in formal, nonformal and informal contexts: this can be the result of an intentional decision or the outcome of different learning activities over time.”(Ibid., p.18) As independent learner, the student is someone whose learning experiences and outcomes could be accumulated, verified and recognized at all times.

The image of the independent learner echoes the process of “de-institutionalisation” that accompanies the European discourse on lifelong learning (Young, 2010). However, in order to describe the mode of existence of the independent learner, an analysis in term of de-institutionalisation falls short. Such analysis focuses on what has disappeared, but easily loses out of sight what comes instead. Especially in the case of the independent learner, the risk is taking the proclaimed liberation of the learner from institutional settings for real, and hence not paying attention to how this ambition is linked with new arrangements. Exactly the processes of ‘re-institutionalisation’ are of interest in this research, and therefore the concern with how the claimed independency leads to particular dependencies. In Foucault’s (1982, p. 232) terms, the focus is on what he refers to as the “double bind” of “individualization” and “totalization” that is characteristic of past and present modes of governing; governing oneself involves a submission to particular rules, norms or ways of seeing and speaking (in order to claim one’s in-dividuality), with as a consequence that the totality of individuals becomes susceptible to governmental intervention (by acting upon these rules or norms). From this perspective, the main research question can be formulated as follows: what are the dependencies of the figure of the independent learner? The answer to this question could be regarded as a story about the mixed feelings of the independent learner, or the shadow side of independency promised to her. For these sketches, the analysis is not limited to ECTS related practices. Other European initiatives and arrangements in higher education institutions are included as well. 

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