Pandemic Privatisation in Higher Education: Edtech & University Reform
‘coded spaces’ (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) in which software performs key tasks, with far-reaching implications for the management and shaping of individual and organisational behaviours. Moreover, the expansion of platforms such as LMSs and OPMs to encompass AI-enhanced personalised learning is evidence of how commercial edtech players understand and seek to expand their future role in HE. Commercial edtech companies and their infrastructures are increasingly central to the enactment of HE at multiple levels. We understand these developments as constituting a shift from the physical infrastructures of on-campus learning to increasingly online, hybrid and even semi-automated systems of HE. While it is still too soon to tell what the post-pandemic landscape of HE will look like, it seems reasonable to predict that most HE institutions will continue to use these commercial infrastructures to expand their offerings, and that the infrastructures will evolve new data analytics and machine learning capacities. This constitutes a form of governing HE through technology, expanding the policy influence of private sector organisations to become ‘shadow’ policy centres, setting the format for HE teaching and learning at a distance, and internationally, through technical infrastructures.
3. University-industry hybridities New public-private partnerships are working to blur the boundaries between sectors. As public HE institutions become increasingly dependent on private sector business models and market-based practices, they risk privatising HE in the pursuit of profits (Robertson and Komljenovic, 2016; White, 2017). Students, as well as faculty members, may be the victims of these partnerships if they’re not managed carefully. For example, the partnership between Arizona University, Arizona University Global Campus and Zovio, may well assist more students to access HE for a reduced cost, but it seems necessary for HE institutions to carefully detail partnership arrangements so students know exactly what educational product they are paying for. Some PPP arrangements appear to be purposely complex to hide profit making intentions (Verger, Moschetti and Fontdevila, 2020). Yet when students are used to generate these profits with smoke and mirror tactics we need to question the ethics of these arrangements. Notwithstanding this need, public HE institutions will increasingly face competition from private ‘challenger’ HE models and startups, and there will be a need to address how they can compete with low-cost, online alternatives 57
