Learning activities through virtual spaces in a hybrid environment has grown in significance since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving an impetus for developing new digital spaces that can emulate or reconstruct traditional physical working environments. In this paper, we present a qualitative comparative field study investigating how people engage in self-regulated learning activities at a university library and with a digital study platform, ST.com. We adopt an agential realist perspective to analyze how self-regulated learners structure the learning environment with the digital learning space. We analyze how the digital elements in the virtual spaces are not standalone entities but become meaningful when learners actively include as well exclude elements while performing the learning activities – a process we call agential cutting following an agential realism ontology. We discuss how our theorizing about self-regulated learning in hybrid environments informs a broader understanding of how knowledge work practices move into virtual spaces.
