Building and enhancing a common European identity has been a key goal of EU executive institutions for decades, leading to various educational policies aiming to ‘transcend’ borders between EU member countries (e.g, Lawn, 2001). Today, this has been concretized in the vision of a European Education Area (EEA) ‘in which learning, studying and doing research would not be hampered by borders’ (European Commission, 2017a). Concurrently, inward migration flows fired up discussions on the meaning of a European identity and prompted reinforcement of borders around EU countries, especially at the ‘edges’ of the EU zone (Börzel & Risse, 2018). The European Commission (EC), nevertheless, has developed policies to ‘integrate’ non-European migrants and refugees into the European education system and to extend educational support beyond European borders (European Commission, 2017b). This indicates two different conceptions on what borders should do: the former emphasizing thatborders should dissolve in order to unify EU territory;  the latter questioning whether borders should fend off, extend to or integrate territory outside of EU.

Responses of the EC following these two different conceptions involve, perhaps counterintuitively, similar policy instruments: initiatives that endorse ‘open’ and online learning. First, while emphasizing the infinite reach of online technologies, the EC has funded various online learning platforms that stimulate cross-border practices and align with the EEA vision (European Commission, 2018). Second, the EC initiated research to explore the potency of online learning for migrants and refugees in and beyond Europe (Colcucci, Devaux, Vrasidas, Safarjalani, & Castaño Muñoz, 2017). Responses of educational researchers have, however, emphasized that changes in technologies and infrastructures are not sufficient to acknowledge the exclusion of refugees. They have specifically urged to recognize who is still excluded, and to reimagine Europe and her identity in a way that furthers inclusion (e.g., EERJ Initiative Group, 2015; Gerrard, 2017).

This study builds on these academic critiques and aims to show how online technologies, while being able to reach large (learning) audiences across nation borders, do not enact a ‘borderless’ space. Specifically, a sociotopological perspective  provokes to consider how online courses produce specific spacesand times by generating new relations and practices between institutions, teachers and learners (e.g., Bayne, Gallagher, & Lamb, 2014). More importantly, it acknowledges how (MOOC) practices install borders by dividing what and who is included or excluded (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2012). Especially since EC-funded online learning initiatives cannot be separated from the ambition of developing a European identity, this raises questions on who and what these initiatives include, what is specifically European in these initiatives and whether this specificity can be reimagined.

The aim of this studyis, accordingly, to examinehow a European space comes forward in open and online learning initiatives funded by the EC and addressed to learners within and outside of European borders. Adopting a sociotopological lens, the study does not assume borderlessness, yet aims to trace practices that enact bordered spaces and times and to examine how (non-)European learners are positioned within these spaces (Burridge, Gill, Kocher, & Martin, 2017). Moreover, it intends to describe how bordering practices are configured and reconfigured, to formulate answers on what is specifically European to these online learning spaces and how this Europeanness evolves (Decuypere & Simons, 2016). In brief, the study addresses the following questions: (1) what bordering practices come forward in an online learning initiative funded by the EC (2) what sorts of spaces-times do these practices produce (3) what is specifically European in these spaces-times and how can their Europenness transform?

The inquiry involves a casestudy on one online learning initiative, which aims to bring learners within and outside of EU borders together. To analyze this initiative, the study employs a composite of methods for data collection and analysis. These methods respond to the sociotopological understanding that spaces and times are produced through practices, and can stretch over different ‘places’ or locations. Specifically pertaining to websites, the methods aim to grasp how space-times are constituted through the interaction between interface designs, its infrastructure of production as well as users’ offline practices (Enriquez, 2013). The first set of methods is adopted to examine the user interface of the online initiative, specifically through an active navigation of the dedicated website. This navigation will be guided by a protocol and recorded through screenshots and observation notes. The protocol will particularly help to focus on relations between images and (hyper)texts, instead of on their separate meaning or presentation (Lemke, 2002). A second set of methods involves interviews with professionals working on the online initiative (e.g., project coordinators, web developers, instructors). These interviews will be conducted face-to-face or through telecommunication and will focus on how the online spaces and times are related to their everyday professional practices (see also Seaver, 2017). Finally, the third set of methods comprises interviews with learners, focusing on their ‘online’ as well as ‘offline’ practices and how these (jointly) produce spaces and times of learning (Sheail, 2018). The data collected through these different methods will be combined, in order to trace relations between online and offline practices and thus to get a comprehensive understanding of practices that make up spaces and times of the learning initiative (cf., Enriquez, 2013).

While the results of the study are still to be generated, we will present the findings in multiple forms. Primarily, the results will comprise descriptions of practices within the examined learning initiative, specifically focusing on the practices that enact borders. The descriptions will address how these practices either mark borders or aid to cross borders, who (e.g., typical learners, teachers) and what (e.g., learning materials, interactions) are related through these practices and thus also who and what is included or excluded. Consequently, these accounts will be translated into a visual as well as (another) textual format. The visual format comprises sketches, made in graphic design software (e.g., Inkscape), that show how different entities in the learning initiative are related or disconnected (e.g., learners and teachers, funding and platform design). These sketches are not intended to ‘mirror reality’, yet they serve as media to present the particular configuration of relations, i.e., a particular form that the (bordering) practices establish (Decuypere & Simons, 2016). The textual format constitutes elaborations (i.e., captions, discussions) of the sketches, as they will address and discuss what the sketches do not show. For example, they will help to describe what the presented spatiotemporal configurations include and exclude, and consequently, what can be said about the sorts of spaces and times produced and about the (European) specificity of the practices (ibid). Together, these results will serve to understand practices as spaces-times of the online learning initiative and to relate these to wider practices within the EU zone or Europe and to show how these appear in specific and different forms (Decuypere, 2018). This will help to not only identify values as envisioned in these EU education policies and how they are formed, yet also how they could transform in the future.

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