This paper explores the issue of digital distraction in higher education and what influences academics’ responses to the challenge.  Research by Flanigan and Titsworth (2020) found that digital distraction during lectures negatively impacted on both the quality and quantity of students’ notes. Digital distraction not only impacts negatively on the student that is engaging in the online behavior, but it can also impact on others sitting in the vicinity of the student (Flanigan & Babchuk, 2022). Therefore, despite decades of attention on digital technologies as devices that can enhance teaching and learning, there is growing evidence of their potential to do the exact opposite, i.e., distract the student from engaging in learning.

Because of the distractive nature of digital technologies in learning, there is a growing body of research exploring this phenomenon. Chen et al (2020) identified three streams of research in this area. The first stream focuses on the extent to which individuals use digital technologies for non-study purposes and the types of digital distraction behaviors. The second stream explores the relationship between digital distraction and student performance and the third stream tries to identify the determinants of digital distraction. There is also work exploring how best to assist students in developing strategies to address digital distraction (Aasgaard 2021).  However, helping students to avoid digital extraction is a challenging task.  Flanigan and Titsworth (2020) comment that digital technologies are unlike previous media technologies in that they are not task limited tools.  Instead, they are used extensively for work, leisure and socialization. Therefore, the opportunities to avoid these technologies are limited.  In looking at the approaches adopted to address this issue in higher education, Ehrlick (2014) identified that there were various ways in which academics tried to combat this issue.  This paper aims to explore these different approaches and, through the lens of student-as-consumer and student-as-customer, aims to show how the increasing commodification of education limits educators’ responses to digital distraction as they are increasingly concerned about student appeasement.

Responses to digital distraction are influenced by many different factors including an academic’s attitude towards digital technology, their pedagogical practices and the nature of the learning environment. Importantly however, it is also influenced by the power dynamics underpinning their relationship with their students. This is the unique contribution of this paper. It is argued that the academic-student relationship in higher education has changed significantly. Tomlinson (2017) notes that amongst the reasons for this perceived change in relationship is the belief that students now see education through a more rights-based perspective and that they expect ‘value for money’ in terms of their educational experience. This shifting pedagogical relationship is partly due to an increasing commodification of education and a, ‘a dominant ethic of rights and entitlement’ that has entered higher education (Tomlinson, 2017, p. 455). This realignment in higher education is also reflected in the valuing the immediate economic gain of education rather than valuing its contribution to long-term intellectual development (Budd, 2017). Amidst the wider marketisation of higher education, metaphorical representations of the student as ‘consumer’ and ‘customer’ are now commonly used (Molesworth, Scullion & Nixon, 2011). Power is therefore a central part of the customer relationship (Maringe, 2011) and given the power of the customer, this has the potential to distort practices to achieve certain goals, particularly in an educational context where power has been gradually transferred from the academic institution to the students (Van Andel et al, 2012) Through a review of the existing research literature, this paper examines the changes in the academic-student relationships and the wider digitisation agenda in higher education and explores how this influences higher education’s response to the issue of digital distraction. It therefore aims to identify from the literature the main responses to digital distraction in higher education and aims to explain the different responses identified in the literature through the lens of changing academic-student relationships in higher education.

The paper argues that the three main approaches identified, banning, ignoring and embracing the technology, can be seen in the context of wider market forces that are causing a shift in conceptualisations of educative relationships in higher education. The fundamental altering of the pedagogical relationship in higher education brought about by these wider changes distorts responses to pedagogical challenges such as digital distraction. It results in decisions that are not always made in the best educational interests of the student. The wider positivity surrounding the use of digital technologies in education adds a further level of complexity to the issue of digital distraction. A powerful persuasive discourse in relation to digital technology’s educational potential, largely driven by a powerful global EdTech industry, permeates education at all levels. Questioning of this techno-positivity challenges a digitisation agenda that higher education has invested significantly in and has been accelerated during the covid pandemic. This has resulted in a perception that the benefits of digital technologies far outweigh their distractive potential. The issue of digital distraction is therefore often downplayed or ignored in order to avoid undermining institutions’ wider digital technology plans. For the professional educator, their professional autonomy to deal with the issue is therefore stifled by both changing lecturer-student relationships and the digitization agenda in higher education. Seen through this lens, it highlights how professional pedagogical issues such as the issue of digital distraction are strongly influenced by wider contextual factors that have the potential to erode the academic’s autonomy to exercise their own professional judgement.

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