EdTech Inc.

Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age

Tanner Mirrlees, Shahid Alvi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367359898
• eBook ISBN: 9781000704921
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book advances a critical political economy approach to EdTech and analyses the economic, political and ideological structures and social power relations that shape the EdTech industries and drive EdTech's development and diffusion.

Particular attention is paid to the integration of EdTech with some of the most contentious developments of our time, including platformization and data-veillance, the automation of work and labor, and globalization-imperialism.

By using a political economy of communication approach, this book will be of value to anyone interested in the current transformations of capitalism, the State, higher education and online learning in the digital age.

1
For a Political Economy of EdTech

If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer, when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.

—Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I

Introduction: EdTech for a Digital Revolution, or Digital Capitalism?

In the 21st century, it is common to read that “we” are living a new “digital age” due to the diffusion, mass use and impact of digital technologies. As of the first month of 2019, Facebook had 2.32 billion monthly users—more than double the total combined populations of the 29 countries that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and more than the sum of the planet’s Christians (Gebel 2019). Every minute of the day in a month, 4 million videos are watched on YouTube and over 400,000 tweets are sent on Twitter. 40,000 Google searches happen in 1 second (Smith 2019). All of this online interaction adds to the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that gets produced each day (Marr 2018). As billions of people around the world network and connect to one another through the Internet and World Wide Web and personal computers, smartphones and platforms interweave with ways of life, work and leisure, this new digital age is often said to be a “revolutionary” one in which a rupture with the past is taking place.

Everything is imagined to be changing, even the institutions of higher education. “Digital Revolution Demands Changes to Education” (Robertson 2018), goes the headline. For the past decade, reports, position papers and policy statements with this theme have circulated everywhere. The specifics of this imperative are encapsulated in documents like the Executive Summary of The Economist’s (2008) New Media Consortium report, “The Future of Higher Education: How Technology Will Shape Learning.” It declares that “technological innovation” may be “changing the very way that universities teach and students learn” (4) because “technology is a disruptive innovation in higher education” that “has had—and will continue to have—a significant impact” (4). The report continues: “online learning is gaining a firm foothold”; technologies will have “a largely positive impact on campuses” despite “operational challenges” and “higher education is responding to globalization” by “leveraging advanced technologies to put education within reach of many individuals around the world” (4). Similarly, The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) (2016) “A Blueprint for Digital Education” states that even the “most prestigious universities must embrace digital education if they are going to compete” with other institutions. To position themselves to “win” the competition, they must integrate “new capabilities in mobile devices, cloud delivery systems, video streaming and other broadband-intensive applications, and learning management systems.”

Framed as an agent of disruption, digital technology in education, or EdTech, is imagined as an unstoppable force of nature descending upon higher education. We are defenseless against it. We must adapt to what EdTech wants from us and embrace what it is doing to us. We have no choice.

But what is EdTech? Clear definitions of the term are in short supply, and this is largely because the meaning of technology itself “is messy and complex” (Hughes 2004, 1); it has been often described as “the knowledge and instruments that humans use to accomplish the purposes of life” (Friedel 2007, 1). The meaning of “digital technology” is no less clean and simple, as this phrase is frequently an umbrella for the totality of devices (hardware), applications (software) and platforms enabling the creation, circulation, storage, retrieval, manipulation or reception of digital content. Current ideas of EdTech are also multifaceted. They tend to encompasses three currents: an academic discipline usually housed in faculties, departments and programs associated with “education”; an educational “design science” or mode of educational governmentality for developing, carrying out and evaluating the whole process of teaching and learning, with the goal of improving educational performance, or a subject’s conduct of educational conduct; and the digital technologies used by teachers and learners for the means and ends deemed “educational.”

In much popular discourse, and throughout much of this book, EdTech tends to denote an industry and commercially available digital technologies used by teachers and learners for the means and ends of something called “education.” For example, the laptop computer is digital technology with a few standard hard components that can store, access and run software, enabling users to complete a wide range of tasks: processing words, creating images, searching for information, sending and receiving messages and so on. A laptop computer is not in itself EdTech, but when the laptop computer comes equipped with software that the corporation which produces it deems “educational” or is used by people for means and ends deemed “educational,” it becomes EdTech. Simply put, when digital technology is adapted, applied or used by teachers and learners to impart or gain knowledge or skills in educational settings, it is EdTech. Very often, EdTech is a buzzword for branded digital hardware that is packaged with educational software and sold on the market. For example, Apple’s iPads and Google’s Chromebooks are EdTech when they are sold with pre-loaded educational software.

Yet, EdTech means much more than a self-enclosed assemblage of hardware and software because all digital technology is part and product of a techno-social “system” relying upon many other tools and people to work (Hughes 2004). Consider, for instance, the smartphone, a “mobile learning technology” touted by EdTech enthusiasts as supporting “new and exciting ways of delivering engaging [educational] content” and helping to “build the digital skills young people need beyond education” (Gowans 2017). Far from being an individualized and personalized EdTech device, the smartphone’s existence and operation depend upon a complex and interdependent techno-social system of many tools and many people that is very much intertwined with the global ecological crisis (Miller and Maxwell 2012). Each day, child workers descend into the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to dig up the metal making up the lithium-ion batteries powering our smartphones (Kara 2018); engineers develop the cellular network that lets us use smartphones to communicate with distant friends; technicians manage the electricity grid we rely upon to charge smartphones before we go to bed; electricians wire buildings with the sockets we plug our smartphone chargers into; application developers, network administrators, cell customer service workers—all are part of the “smartphone eco-system.” Like the smartphone, EdTech also relies upon a system of preexisting tools and labors. In 1801, the Scottish headmaster James Pillans affixed a big piece of slate to the wall of his classroom, inventing the “blackboard.” But this would not have been possible without the machines of mining and refining limestone into a chalky writing utensil and Pillans’s ability to use his mind and hand to craft words with it. The slate board, the chalk, language, the mind and the human hand—all were parts of the blackboard “system.” Today, actual blackboards have been removed from most classrooms and replaced by Blackboard Inc.’s online course management system (Rivard 2013c).

Even though the meaning of “EdTech” is complex and multifaceted, politicians across the Republican-Democratic partisan divide seem to be sure that EdTech should fundamentally transform higher education. During his second term in office, US president Barack Obama championed massive open online courses (MOOCs) and “flipped” classrooms as a “rising tide of innovation” that has “the potential to shake up the higher education landscape,” making education more affordable and more accessible (cited in Bogost 2013). Newt Gingrich (2014), former Congressman and House of Representatives speaker, argued that colleges should emulate and improve upon the business model of digital streaming companies, opining: “[W]hen most information and knowledge is transmitted digitally and is increasingly personalized—think about how Netflix, Pandora, Twitter and Facebook work […] we should be able to do much better than that.” Across North America, politicians and policy makers push public colleges and universities to integrate EdTech into their operations. Sometimes, they rationalize their digital offerings as a way to flexibly provide educational “access” to the millions of non-traditional students who struggle to balance precarious work and life with a love of learning. In other instances, universities incorporate EdTech to build brands to differentiate themselves from “competitors” and then try to convert public awareness of these brands into increased enrollments and revenue (ICEF Monitor 2012). In any case, EdTech-centered and digital learning initiatives are rapidly expanding, as is a for-profit EdTech industry (Lederman and Lieberman 2019). In 2018, US-based EdTech companies alone raised a record $1.45 billion from venture capitalists and private equity investors to support their development of digital learning devices, and, by the end of 2019, the EdTech industry was expected to hit $43 billion in value (Premack 2018).

In an age in which EdTech has been incorporated into the circuits of capitalism, the argument that somehow public education has failed in its mission and that it is time for Silicon Valley to “disrupt” and “fix things” with “revolutionary” and “solution-centered” EdTech is a pervasive one. As major corporations such as Apple, Alphabet-Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook advance new plans to fundamentally transform higher education, and myriad smaller firms launch new EdTech gadgets, apps, and services to “take over the classroom” (Singer 2017), and the corporations that operate MOOC platforms are celebrated for displacing “legacy” public education systems around the world, the notion that higher education is a problem to be fixed by EdTech is gaining momentum. Both established corporations and start-ups maintain they can do better than public educators and have launched a variety of new EdTech ventures into an expansive education “market.”

For instance, in 2012, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation partnered with AT&T to seed $1 billion to Amplify, a company promoting itself to shareholders as reimagining “the way teachers teach and students learn” by selling digital curricula, platforms and 4G tablets to students in kindergarten to 12th grade (Strauss 2015). Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook backs Bridge International Academies, a for-profit platform education business that is expanding across Africa, “yielding sizable profits” while also “delegitimizing public education in those countries” (Chen 2019). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seeds millions to EdTech start-ups that promise to make higher education more market “efficient” with digital technology (often sold by Microsoft) (Strauss 2014). Google’s IT Support Professional Certificate program—offered through Coursera—promises to directly train students to become workers for entry-level technology jobs (Roberts 2018). Looking to recapture a piece of the EdTech market lost to Google’s Chromebook and Microsoft’s Windows laptop, Apple Inc. now sells EdTech “products for learning” (i.e. iPads for students) and “tools for teaching” (i.e. educational Apps for teachers) (Dignan 2018).

While EdTech firms, products and services are praised by politicians and promoted by business leaders for supposedly lowering the cost of course delivery, increasing student access and improving quality, the actual impact of EdTech upon higher education is contentious and widely debated (Bowen 2015; DeMillo 2015; Craig 2015; Losh 2014; Lucas 2015; Shark 2015; Selwyn 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017). In a time when EdTech industry groups, public relations officers, trade publications and even mainstream news outlets craft optimistic stories about how EdTech will revolutionize everything (Russo 2017), and many North American politicians and educational leaders enthusiastically embrace the brave new world Silicon Valley is promising, significant EdTech thinkers—from EdTech Strategies’ president Doug Levin to the self-described “Cassandra of EdTech” Audrey Watters—have encouraged a healthy skepticism of EdTech to counter the “hype cycle” that tends to accompany each and every new EdTech development (Russo 2018).

The notion that new means of communication will become a new and better means of teaching and learning is not unique to the 21st century. Optimism about EdTech stretches back in time. In the 20th century, each communications device considered “revolutionary” in its respective time—the typewriter, the motion picture projector, the radio, the TV set and the computer—was reconfigured as EdTech, advertised as a means to improve how professors teach and students learn and then applied to higher education (Cuban 1986, 1993, 2003, 2013). Yet, few of the new EdTech tools did what they were hyped to do. After emerging, often with much fanfare, the new EdTech was not adopted or utilized by teachers and students en masse and frequently failed to fundamentally change everything for the better. The utopian hope for a better education system and a world invested in new EdTech was routinely spoiled by existing social structures and power relations. Years later, though, a new device would emerge and then again get touted as changing higher education—and the wider society—for the better, and the cycle of promise and disappointment would repeat itself (Cuban 1986, 1993). The EdTech hype cycle repeats even though there is “little rigorous evidence produced over the past forty years of technology leading to the sustained improvement of teaching and learning” (Selwyn 2016a, 8). We should know better than to buy into this hype cycle, but some do it anyway, perhaps wishing EdTech’s outcome will be different than before, better this time round.

Too often, immersion in the EdTech hype cycle distracts from the real economic and political structures, institutions and interests that are shaping and attempting to benefit from EdTech’s development, diffusion, application and impact in society. Instead of hyping learning to love or loathe EdTech, we need to ask and try to answer socially relevant questions about EdTech. What caused higher education’s problems and why is EdTech being imagined as the best solution? What actors are trying to disrupt or transform higher education with EdTech? What motivates them? Why? For what ends? In response to what material conditions? Who might benefit and lose as result? With what social consequence? By posing and attempting to answer socially conscious questions like these, we may begin to dispute the idea that the present and future of higher education in North America is unavoidably being transformed for the better by EdTech. We can exercise caution against slipshod forecasts and predictions of EdTech’s “disruption” and “revolution” of higher education.

The Focus and Structure of the Book

In this book, we wager that to understand the real world education and EdTech in the 21st century, we need to begin with knowledge of political economy, not technology per se. To this end, this book advances a political economy of communication approach to EdTech and a critique of the EdTech industry. We probe the economic and political structures, social power relations, organizations and interests that shape EdTech’s development, diffusion and adoption. By examining EdTech as part and product of industry and shedding light on the interests behind EdTech’s financing, ownership, production and social impact, we argue that EdTech is being shaped by and for capitalism, a contradictory and crisis-prone system in which goods and services are produced for sale with the intention of making a profit.

By doing so, this book treads in the footsteps of important political economists of communication who contend that digital technology extends—as opposed to transcends—capitalism (Dean 2009, 2014, 2015; Fuchs 2014, 2015, 2017; Huws 2003, 2014, 2015; Jin 2013, 2015; Maxwell 2015; McChesney 2008, 2013; Mosco 2004, 2009, 2014, 2017; Robins and Webster 1999; Schiller 1999, 2007, 2014; Srnicek 2017). Castells (1996, 19) describes the “network society” as “linked to the expansion and rejuvenation of capitalism.” Dyer-Witheford (1999, 20) demonstrates how “the new high technologies” are shaped and deployed by capitalism into “instruments of an unprecedented, worldwide order of general commodification.” Schiller (2000, 1) shows how the “networking drive” of information and communication technologies (ICTs) corporations and neoliberal policy makers “to develop an economy wide network that can support an ever-growing range of intra-corporate and intercorporate business processes” instigated the growth of “digital capitalism.” Fuchs (2009, 387) uses the term “transnational informational capitalism” to highlight the importance of “information technologies and knowledge” in a “transnational and flexible regime of accumulation,” while Dean (2014, 4) harnesses the idea of “communicative capitalism” to show how all processes of “capitalist productivity” derive from and drive the “expropriation and exploitation of communicative processes.”

With these and related insights in mind, this book interrogates how EdTech is shaped by old, new and emerging capitalist logics and disputes the deterministic and optimistic idea that EdTech is in itself driving a “revolution” that breaks from the social problems of the past and makes a new and better future. We demonstrate EdTech to be a significant and fast-growing sector of the current ICT and cultural industries and show how this sector is bankrolled by global financiers and constituted by profit-seeking firms that rely upon waged and unwaged human labor to produce, distribute and sell EdTech hardware, software and services as commodities to the growing “market” of higher education. A critical rejoinder to the awe-inspiring rhetoric surrounding the “big five” EdTech giants (Apple, Alphabet-Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook), EdTech start-ups, massive open online course corporations (MOOCCs) and libertarian reformers who praise EdTech’s “disruption” of higher education, the book builds upon the political economy of communication (PEC) tradition to map the shifting social terrain in which major corporate and State actors are pushing for the transformation of higher education with EdTech. To offer a socially conscientious assessment of EdTech (#techwithaconscience is our university’s mantra), we also raise concerns about EdTech’s potential to thwart social justice, labor’s dignity, deliberative democracy and cultural integrity. As EdTech’s private titans make inroads into the public institutions of education, we take stock of their attempt to reconfigure these into new spaces of capital accumulation and interrogate the social class interests advanced and obscured when administrators, teachers and learners see in EdTech, both a panacea and unquestionable benefit to all.

To understand why EdTech appears as a “solution” to the myriad problems facing higher education, we need to first understand the real material conditions at the core of higher education’s current woes. The goal of Chapter 2—“Higher Education in a ‘Digital Age’: Capitalism, Neoliberalism and the University, Inc.”—is to shed light on the social structures, organizations and interests that are keen on reshaping the institutions of higher education with EdTech in the 21st century. After introducing the key characteristics of capitalism and the governmental regime of neoliberalism in the “digital age,” we show how universities and colleges are being transformed by these economic, political and technological structures to conform with and reproduce them. Having painted the big picture of higher education in transformation, we focus in the remaining chapters on how the EdTech industry is disrupting higher education in pursuit of profit. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 probe the EdTech industry and also focus on the MOOCC, which is one of this industry’s most widely hyped agents of disruption. These chapters use the political economy of communications approach to analyze how the EdTech industry—and the MOOCC—advances digital capitalism in the classroom. They contextualize and critique how EdTech corporations may work to cannibalize, compete with and eventually displace publicly provisioned systems of education in North America and around the world.

In 2012, many MOOCCs launched from US Ivy League universities and, soon after, from universities around the world. Today, two of the world’s biggest MOOCCs are Coursera and Udacity (founded by Stanford University professor-entrepreneurs Daphne Koeller, Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun). The MOOCC’s most significant product—the MOOC—is branded as “massive” (because it can theoretically enroll hundreds, even hundreds of thousands, of students simultaneously); “open” (because anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, digital literacy and financial means can take it); “online” (because course materials—lectures, tests, assignments—are digitized, delivered and accessed within Web-based computer- and Internet-mediated environments); and a “course” (because it can, in theory, be assessed for a certificate or other official recognition) (Heller 2013). Since 2012 (described by some as “The Year of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 For a Political Economy of EdTech
• 2 Higher Education in a “Digital Age”: Capitalism, Neoliberalism and the University, Inc.
• 3 Profiting on Higher Education: Platform Capitalism Is the Classroom
• 4 Automating Higher Education: Taylorism and the Teaching Machines
• 5 Globalizing Higher Education: Platform Imperialism
• 6 Conclusion: A Pedagogy for Technological Citizenship, a Pedagogy for the Precariat Working Class
• References
• Index