Where do you see yourself in 34 years time? Here in 2054 we are currently accepting a limited number of new students into University V, the greatest university on earth. Upon registration you will be given a number, an icon, key dance moves and most importantly your own unique pedagoganym which you will be known by each semester as you ascend through the plateaus and student castes until you step through the final fires of graduation. The neons you will be rendered in, during your time in University V, are from one of our most vivid and colourful set of datafications yet.

You will study under High Professors and University Archangels to learn about fascinating and risque topics such as the ancient barbarisms of reading and writing (Costello et al. 2021). Come to our exclusive open day and meet the team. Come and see if we can close the deal with you. Come and you can leave a dead and cruel world behind because only University V is alive (Bayne, 2008).

Come and meet our top researchers and sample cutting edge scholarship. Through the methodologies of speculative fiction (Cox 2021; Fuchsberger et al. 2017; Collier and Ross 2020; Selwyn et al. 2020) you will learn about studies conducted using time machines and other chronotropic accoutrements. For you, it will be as if time “thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible” (Bakhtin 1981) as we transport you way back to 2018 and reveal fragments of the Lost Codex. This tattered manuscript contains strange pieces of an abandoned research study conducted with online distance learning students.

These student stories are assembled from an analysis of interviews and focus groups conducted with these students. They are centred around students’ use of textbooks focusing on: access to books, their monetary cost, accessibility to students with disabilities and also their materiality, or how they actually feel to students in their lived realities as adult distance learners.