The dawn of the platform university - the tail wagging the dog?

Photo by h heyerlein on Unsplash

The implications of concepts such as platform capitalism or surveillance capitalism are unfolding week by week and higher education is no safe haven. For several years now we have been discussing the unbundling of higher education with the emergence of new models of course delivery, alternative credentials and new educational institutions. Educational platforms have enabled universities to offer digital solutions that would have been almost impossible to produce in-house but in return the platform companies have gained access to vast amounts of student data that can be analysed to develop new services to sell to the universities. For en excellent analysis of this process see Laura Czerniewicz's article in Educause Review, Unbundling and Rebundling Higher Education in an Age of Inequality.

However, the tables are now turning from the platform serving higher education to higher education serving the platform, according to an article by Ben Williamson on the UK higher education blog Wonkhe, The platform university: a new data-driven business model for profiting from HE.

The university is being transformed by platform technologies and companies. Although software platforms have been inside HE for years, HE is now moving inside the software platform. In the emerging platform university, more and more HE services are being delegated to software, algorithms, and automation. The business logic of platform capitalism has captured the academy, and the public role of the university has become a source of private financial gain.

Basically student data is valuable raw material to platform companies enabling them to develop more attractive services and attract advertisers. The article offers several examples of companies who are benefiting from this model, for example the  plagiarism detection platform that processes enormous amounts of student data in the form of all the essays and assignments it analyses every day. At the same time it would be extremely costly for institutions to develop and run such platforms themselves on a non-profit basis and so we depend more an more on commercial platforms. The danger, according to Williamson, is that the education sector is in danger of losing control.

Significant HE spending is now flowing from universities to platform providers, along with data they can use to their own advantage as market actors in an emerging sub-sector of platform capitalism. Unless universities act collectively in the sector’s own interests, they may find themselves positioned as educational product providers and data collection partners for the new HE platform industry.

Another new concept that has been discussed recently is platform literacy, mostly in terms of our individual awareness of the implications of using different social media platforms and tools. That literacy can now also apply at an institutional level in that we need to build an awareness of the affordances and implications of using external platforms for educational purposes.