The state of emergency in higher education systems around the world during the Covid-19 pandemic has opened up the sector to an expanding range of education technologies, commercial companies, and private sector ambitions. In our new report commissioned by Education International (the global federation of teacher unions), entitled ‘Pandemic Privatisation in Higher Education: Edtech and University Reform’, we examine various ways commercialization and privatization of higher education have been pursued and advanced through the promotion of edtech and ‘digital transformation’ agendas during campus closures and disruptions over the last year. Although we recognize that digital technologies and private or commercial organizations can bring many benefits to HE, they also raise significant challenges with long-term implications for HE staff, students and institutions. Many of these challenges are long-term political and economic matters as much as they are short-term practical matters of online teaching.
The report is detailed and long enough, but even since we finished it in late 2020, the developments we identified have accelerated and expanded. These include investors seeking to capitalize on new visions of teaching and learning, and multisector coalitions coming together to reimagine the future of HE through digital infrastructure and platform-based transformations — ultimately ‘re-infrastructuring’ and ‘platformizing’ universities to operate according to design principles imported by the digital tech industry. These are profoundly political issues about control, power, influence and governance in HE, mirrored by similar shifts of control to technology in the health sector.
Maybe most of the proposed changes associated with so-called digital transformation won’t work CONTINUE READING: Code Acts in Education: Pandemic Privatization and Digitalization in Higher Education | National Education Policy Center