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.

Paths to openness

  by hockadilly on Flickr

Martin Weller's new book The battle for open provides an excellent overview of the role of openness in higher education today. It charts the development of the main strands of openness (open access, MOOCs, open educational resources and open scholarship) and suggests that although the MOOC boom has made people more aware of the opportunities of open online education it is a false dawn. Interpretations of openness vary greatly and most MOOCs choose to only focus on free access but maintain full copyright on the material. Major investments of venture capital underpin the mainstream MOOC movement and many academics are concerned about the commercialisation of higher education.

One might therefore expect this to be a time of celebration for the advocates of openness. Having fought so long for their message to be heard, they are now being actively courted by senior management for their experience and views on various open strategies. Open approaches are featured in the mainstream media. Millions of people are enhancing their learning through open resources and open courses. Put bluntly, it looks as though openness has won. And yet you would be hard pushed to find any signs of celebration amongst those original advocates. They are despondent about the reinterpretation of openness to mean ‘free’ or ‘online’ without some of the reuse liberties they had envisaged. Concerns are expressed about the commercial interests that are now using openness as a marketing tool. Doubts are raised regarding the benefits of some open models for developing nations or learners who require support. At this very moment of victory it seems that the narrative around openness is being usurped by others, and the consequences of this may not be very open at all.

Weller points to the Silicon Valley narrative that education is broken and that commercial solutions will reinvent the sector. It's an attractive and media-friendly argument that has won many supporters and I'll admit that I've been won over by many of the articles and videos that have gone viral in recent years. The image of a hopelessly outdated system based on dull lectures and exam halls and failing to exploit digital technology may have some truth in it but is still a sweeping generalisation that fails to acknowledge the advances made in online higher education in the past 15 years. The MOOC concept was after all developed by university faculty and researchers as pedagogical innovation, Silicon Valley latched on and adapted the idea several years later.

So with the spotlight still focused on mainstream MOOCs some of the really interesting develoments have been taking place in the shade. If we are at a crossroads in the development of openness with one road leading to commercialisation we also need to see an alternative route where resources and tools are shared openly with permission to reuse and remix. One possible avenue could be the new initiative Unizin which is a consortium of American universities whose aim is to take control of their own infrastructure, resources and tools and offer a non-commercial cloud-based platform for higher education, outside the influence of commercial actors. Many fear that by linking up with major corporations and venture capital sponsored MOOC consortia higher education may be selling its soul to big business. Unizin wants to create a common cloud repository for educational resources that can be freely shared. The main driving force behind this is the potential of learning analytics and if student data is kept within the educational domain then it can be analysed for educational purposes.

Our goals and purpose in endorsing Unizin are simple: As professors and members of the academy, we want to support faculty and universities by ensuring that universities and their faculty stay in control of the content, data, relationships, and reputations that we create. As we look at the rapidly emerging infrastructure that enables digital learning, we want to bias things in the direction of open standards, interoperability, and scale. Unizin is about tipping the table in favor of the academy by collectively owning (buying, developing, and connecting) the essential infrastructure that enables digital learning on our campuses and beyond.

In a similar vein the Finnish government has announced plans for a national cloud-based educational platform called EduCloud (information in Finnish only at present) which aims to house a national repository of open educational resources as well as common tools and services. There is no doubt that commercial actors will continue to offer innovative solutions for education but the path to true openness lies in the educational sector taking charge of their resources and services. But this path is not about each institution building its own solution but in national and international cooperation. Maybe this will be a major theme for 2015. 

The mirage of freedom

 by Michael Gwyther-Jones on Flickr

Freedom, like openness is a very subjective concept. One person's freedom is another's prison and this is especially true in the digital world. I have a colleague who refuses to create accounts with companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon etc on the grounds that he wants to keep as much control of his digital identity as possible and does not want to sell his digital soul to corporate interests. With all the debate around net surveillance this attitude is very understandable and he considers himself free. This attitude is not unusual but it does create difficulties when collaborating with people like me who enjoy the freedom of cloud services and social media and rely on them to work efficiently. My freedom is the convenience of storing resources in the cloud and being able to work from any device anywhere. I value that freedom so highly that I'm willing to overlook the fact that all my work is stored by giant corporations who sell some of it to advertisers and will use my data for future service development as they discover ways of refining the crude oil of raw data. Freedom is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

Similarly I wonder about the freedom of open educational resources and personal learning networks. How open and free are they when they are often dependent on commercial services? Traditional learning management systems are often criticised for being walled gardens and therefore offering less freedom than using social media but we fail to see the lack of freedom involved in letting for-profit companies store our data. How free are you when the company decides to start charging for the service or pulls the plug completely? Even if your resources have open Creative Commons license and are thereby open and free to use they are often stored on commercial services like Flickr, Google, Dropbox etc.

So is freedom just a mirage? Do we have to choose between the two interpretations of freedom described here or is there a way to collaborate, store, create and share online without getting tied into commercial services. Thank goodness for spaces like WikiEducator, Wikiversity and Wikimedia Commons which are non-commercial, self-regulating communities with a culture of sharing. If you are looking for freedom maybe that's the direction to head.

Learning to deal with free - don't put all your eggs in the same basket

 by paulmorriss

We often hear that if you don't pay for something then you are the product, especially in connection with social media and cloud computing. Companies offer attractive services for free in return for information about ourselves that can then be used for targeted advertising or to tempt us into buying a more advanced version of the service (so called freemium). However there's nothing new with this concept. We've had many years of commercial radio and TV who offer their services "free" and the cost is being subjected to sometimes rather intense advertising. Many magazines which we pay good money for are over 50% pure advertising and many of the articles are slightly more discrete lifestyle advertising. Most of us have loyalty cards that give us discount at the cost of giving the company information about every purchase we make. Read more on this in an article from 2012, Stop Saying 'If You're Not Paying, You're The Product'.

The concept of free raises a lot of integrity issues, especially when cloud services are used in an educational context. An article in Inside Higher Ed, Teaching Ethically with the Free Web, raises many relevant questions about using services like Google Apps, Facebook, Dropbox, WordPress and iCloud in schools and colleges. Many of these are excellent for collaborative writing, discussion, project work and reflection and are more user-friendly and attractive than more closed environments such as learning management systems. However they all have different policies for privacy and ownership of content and each has to be examined and discussed. Another issue is that some are not compatible with tools that improve accessibility for those with visual impairments.

However the article advises teachers to become more aware of the implications of using open services and discussing them with their students. For example the documents you store on a cloud service are probably your own intellectual property but the information you put in your profile is probably not. Becoming aware of the conditions is the first step to taking control of your digital footprint and this is an essential classroom discussion that needs to be repeated and refined over the years. The article offers the following practical advice to teachers working with cloud services and social media.

• Inform ourselves about the technologies we are using with students and our responsibilities as their teachers—both legally according to FERPA and ethically according to our beliefs and our students’ best interests. To that end, I’ve provided links to the policy and privacy statements of all of the apps and technologies mentioned in this post in the fact box above.
• Engage our students in conversations about whatever apps or technologies we will be using in our courses, including conversations about what will be done with their personal information or content.
• Offer options whenever possible as alternatives to particular web services. This gets tricky when using reminder or organizational applications, but you can always use multiple reminder services (Twitter and Remind101, for example) to keep students up-to-date on changes to the syllabus, or give groups options for online collaboration when they are completing collaborative projects.

The advantages of using free social media and cloud-based services are too many to simply ignore but we need to be aware of the conditions and actively discuss the issues when using them in teaching. And don't put all the eggs in the same basket.

Top IT issues

  by  torkildr

What's the trend of the year in educational technology? Most people would immediately shout out MOOCs (as I predicted way back in January, 2012 - the year of the MOOC) but according to an Educause survey, Top-10 IT issues 2012,  the most important concerns are not whether to join the MOOC movement but the fundamental issue of how to integrate IT into all of the university's activities and develop more mature strategies for the use of technology.

The survey asked a panel of higher education IT experts what the biggest single IT-realted issue facing their institution had been in 2012. Here's their top ten:

1. Updating IT professionals' skills and roles to accommodate new technologies and changing IT delivery models
2. Supporting IT consumerization and bring-your-own device programs
3. Developing a cloud strategy
4. Improving the institution's operational efficiency through IT
5. Integrating IT into institutional decision-making
6. Using analytics to support the important institutional outcomes
7. Funding IT initiatives
8. Transforming the institution's business with IT
9. Supporting research with high-performance computing, large data, and analytics
10. Establishing and implementing IT governance throughout the institution

Source: "Educause Top-Ten IT Issues 2012" from Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR)


The common thread here is the need to integrate technology use into all areas of the university from the management down and to ensure that staff have the right competence to deal with this change. IT is no longer simply a technology issue and is no longer limited to the IT department; it supports all processes and affects every member of staff. Educational technology is moving from a marginal pioneer movement of enthusiasts to mainstream and default. Institutional strategies are now needed where before there were simply uncoordinated grassroots initiatives. The tools and software that were once provided in-house are now freely available in the cloud and at the same time the carefully controlled infrastructure of university owned computer labs is being replaced by students using their own devices and expecting access anywhere any time.

The challenges facing the role of IT in higher education are finding strategies of benefitting from the diversity and freedom of cloud-based solutions and personal devices while maintaining some level of control and security. The survey highlight above all else the rapidly changing role of the university IT department.

"This year's list transcends the IT org chart with two predominant themes: the IT organization's obligation to the institution; and the IT organization's relationship to technology outside the institution. The former views the IT organization as an enabler and partner in helping colleges and universities adapt to and even capitalize on changing realities and needs via automation (Issue #4), analytics (Issue #6), business transformation (Issue #8), and research computing (Issue #9). It also recognizes that the IT organization's relationship with institutional leaders must be effective for it to truly support institutional priorities, by integrating information technology into institutional decision-making (Issue #5), funding information technology strategically (Issue #7), and establishing and implementing IT governance throughout the institution (Issue #10)."

Read more in an article in Campus Technology, Reflecting on the Top IT Issues of 2012

Unplugged

  by  the JoshMeister 

Many of the conferences and seminars I attend are full of online educators all sporting the latest in laptop and mobile technology. Many want to tweet, blog and mail their impressions of the conference or look up the links that are suggested in the sessions. However there's often frustration in the ranks as we realize that the conference venue has no or inadequate wifi, a severe shortage of power sockets or poor mobile coverage. Many university lecture halls have a handful power sockets up front for the lecturer but nowhere else and getting a seat near one of these oases becomes hard currency.

This year I've sampled all variants but it seems that many venues are not keeping up with the explosive development of social media. Wifi capacity that was fine a year ago for checking web pages and mail is now hopelessly inadequate when everyone is filming, sending photos and live streaming. In addition we're now writing our notes on cloud services like Google Docs, preparing slideshows on SlideShare or Prezi and all of that needs net access. As we migrate towards cloud computing, demands on conference venues' wifi will accelerate and those who are not prepared will suffer. There's no point at looking at last year's stats when planning this year's conference.

Imagine when every delegate comes with a cloud-based laptop like the Google Chromebook or with iPads and other tablets. Plan capacity on those lines now and you will be an attractive venue next year.

Head in the clouds

The forecast for the next few years in the tech world is very cloudy. A few weeks ago saw Google announce the new Chromebook, a computer-like device that has a browser and precious little else in it. Since you can do just about everything in the cloud today what's the point of having all those applications in your computer? Goodbye computers and all the complicated maintenance they entail. If all your applications and storage are in the cloud you don't need to fetch updates, buy anti-virus protection, configure, clean and all the other routines you hate.

This week it's Apple's turn to grab the cloud computing limelight with the new iCloud concept. The idea here is to move all the apps on your Apple devices into the cloud and enable you to access everything from any device (as long as its an Apple device of course - that's the catch). Your e-mail, documents, photos, films and most importantly music will all be stored remotely instead of on one computer as today. If you make changes on one device they will apply to all devices making it irrelevant which one you use. You can start reading an e-book on your laptop and then continue reading on your iPad for example.

I get frustrated with the current situation where I have all my iTunes material on one older computer and can't work out how to move all the music to a newer computer. It's not easy and I cynically suspect that that was the intention. Also iTunes needs regular updates which tend to pop up when you least want them and take consideable time to download and install. To avoid all that hassle and to be able to access everything without all those syncing sessions at home would be heaven.

What does this mean for education however? Well everything really since it will accelerate the shift to cloud computing making all computer labs obsolete and forcing the IT departments to reinvent themselves. There's a good article on this on the blog Apps in Education called What iCloud means for Education - You can "iCloud it".

I really hope that the move into the cloud will make IT more user friendly. There's simply too much tech in today's computers for the average non-techie to cope with. Few people really know how to upgrade, install patches, check security, fix bugs etc and even fewer actually find such things interesting. If cloud computing lets us easily access services without having to mess around under the hood all the better. The only worry I have with this move is that the main players (Google, Apple) want us to subscribe to their walled garden. The iCloud solution is probably going to be very easy to use, secure and cool as long as you accept the limitaions. It may be that we have to sacrifice freedom for ease of use and convenience. I hope not but that's the way it generally goes in business.

by  AJC1