In late-modern societies, haste seems to have become a defining feature of people's lives. We regulate our activities and use of time from waking up to going to bed according to clocks. In economic terms, time is a resource that we allocate to commodities (De Serpa, 1971), and according to the principle of economic optimisation, a rational individual is expected to maximise his utility for a given unit of time.  

Closely linked to this phenomenon are two social processes central to the late modern era, namely acceleration processes and colonization of the future. By acceleration, Hartmut Rosa (2013) refers to the increased tempo of social life that emerges from the self-feeding cycle of technological and social acceleration, as well as the acceleration of the pace of life. On the other hand, Barbara Adam and Chris Groves (2007) describe colonisation of the future as the way in which we increasingly seek to control the future from the present by subordinating it to our current needs and wants. 

This study explores the problems of time in higher education theory, policy and practice, in particular from the perspective of the aforementioned processes. Acceleration processes have proven to be relevant in the context of education (Gibbs et al., 2014), with universities racing against the clock and each other to produce more research, degrees and other key performance outputs within increasingly tight timeframes. This materializes in increased time pressures as experienced by both higher education employees (Berg & Seeber, 2016) and students (Mahon, 2021). The value and processual uncertainty of academic work and learning seems to be reduced to the fastest possible realisation of the productivity and utility dreams we have invested in the future for the benefit of the present. 

These temporal challenges of higher education have many symptomatic consequences for late-modern societies. Firstly, the need to achieve more in less time can endorse corrupted working cultures and damage academic virtues (Kidd, 2023). Moreover, they place higher education students in an unequal position in relation to the completion of their studies, considering their diverse backgrounds and life circumstances (Bennett & Burke, 2018). Solutions to these problems have been proposed through a critical deconstruction and redefinition of the Western linear conception of time (i.e., Bennett & Burke, 2018) and also through temporal resistance movements, like slow scholarship (Berg & Seeber, 2016; Mountz et al., 2015) and slow education (Wear et al., 2015), which emphasise the sufficient allocation of time for academic activities.  

In the context of the current presentation, the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) is investigated as an important case example of educational policy instruments with accelerative tendencies. Being the main academic credit system of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), ECTS credits tie the achievement of learning outcomes to a certain amount of study time spent, and thus serve as a key instrument for educational acceleration (Sarauw, 2023). As such, credits represent a time-based learning currency that strictly links the workload of studying and successful learning to the time spent studying. In relation to this setting, the current research project specifically addresses two questions: 1) What is the role of time in education in relation to the contemporary time pressures of higher education, and 2) what the contribution of academic credit systems like the ECTS to these temporal challenges is. The project involves both theoretical research and an empirical phase. The current presentation concerns the matter mainly from the perspectives of educational and time theory. 

The first phase of this project focused on the relationship of a linear time conception to time pressures in higher education and to education as an activity (Impola, 2023). Drawing on both philosophy of time and education, the main argument was that, although education is by nature an uncertain and open activity, it nevertheless takes place in a linear-temporal framework: In education we are oriented towards some future aims in terms of growth and learning, the possibility of which is built on past experiences and can only be realised through goal-oriented action in the present. Instead of alternative, nonlinear theorisations of time, this project outlines ways to alleviate the speeding-up tendencies of contemporary higher education systems by development of such temporal structures for education that enable finding a suitable pace for studies in respect to this linear framework. This could be achieved for example by rethinking and developing more reasonable and equitable workload determination practices in higher education. In respect to this framework, ECTS plays a key role, because it is based on the idea of estimating the time-based workload of studies in the degree plans. Officially, one ECTS credit corresponds to 25-30 hours and 60 credits to 1500-1800 hours of student work per year (European Commission, 2015; Wagenaar, 2019). In the second phase of this project this rationale is deconstructed to point out both practical and theoretical challenges that are present in ECTS. The practical challenges stem from the difficulty of measuring students' time uses across different life situations and education contexts uniformly, especially as students' real study time does not directly correspond to the study time as estimated in ECTS (Souto-Iglesias & Baeza Romero, 2018). Moreover, time spent studying and students’ perceived workload are different things, and they affect academic performance differently (Barbosa et al., 2018). These challenges contribute also to theory-level problems, which relate to the nature of ECTS as an academic currency that defines a time-based value for studies. This study demonstrates some key problems related to this analogy, which have to do especially with the highly context-specific regulation practices of the value of this key educational currency of EHEA. The diversity of higher education programs is not only difficult to be coherently represented by a single temporal formula, but different educational-political motives can also encourage differing regulatory strategies, like overloading the credits to preserve educational excellence or underloading them to promote faster credit accumulation.

If successful, this research can present ways to navigate the time pressures of globalizing educational marketplace, which stem from both acceleration processes and the desires to realise our future-oriented needs in the present. In contrast to the late-modern social scientific criticism, the current project operates from the viewpoint that these strategies do not necessarily have to involve total deconstruction and reformulation of the linear time consciousness which seems to be the basis of nearly all socially coordinated processes of the late-modern societies (Impola, 2023). Instead, we should be able to embrace the slowness, uncertainty and risk present in education (Biesta, 2015) and learn to find an appropriate rhythm for education, which means sufficient speed and slowing down at each moment, rather than overprioritizing either over the other (Kidd, 2023; Wear et al., 2015). At the level of educational policy, we need to rethink our practices on credit systems such as ECTS. To this end, the research project has produced a new model of student workload, which is divided into externally determined and student’s internal experience of workload and the factors that influence these (Publication under review). The model allows us to better understand the tensions between the estimated and actual student workloads and to relate them appropriately to each other. One of the main implications of the model is that it clarifies the role of ECTS as a supportive educational planning tool for course and curriculum design work, instead of a becoming a temporal-normative framework for judging progression in studies. At best, credits can be used to design degrees with relatively evenly distributed workloads that ensure that students have sufficient time to complete their studies, while student’s experience of workload and learning are each measured according to their own suitable measures, instead of credit accumulation being used as their proxy.

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