Digital technologies are nowadays interwoven in the very fabric of our everyday lives. Our personal and professional worlds are entangled in increasingly complex knots of digital technoscientific knowledges. Digitisation is emerging in education too. Its growing importance has been discussed in terms of a digital governance of education that is being fabricated and enacted across Europe and beyond. Digital technologies are indeed relevant to the fields of school, higher education and lifelong learning.
Digitisation processes are increasingly mediated by and made operational through digital platforms, to be intended as both technical infrastructures, political stages, and array of relationship that constantly need to be performed. A ¿platform education¿ thus emerge which concerns the processes of learning, teaching and governing education as they are mediated by and enacted through digital platforms. Higher Education (HE) is rapidly becoming digital and platformized, both in practice and in policy spheres.
Despite their growing importance, platforms for digital education have scarcely been focused as «matters of concern». The aim of this contribution is thus to bring to the forefront the invisible work of digital platforms for higher education and to elaborate on their potential vulnerabilities. Two main paths will be pursued.
First, an attempt will be made to disentangle the platformization of the Italian HE and describe how digital platforms made their way into Italian academic arena. The multiple and intertwined trails of platformization will be shadowed with respect to three case studies whose stories will be told by tracing local/global streams and public/private tensions. Secondly, critical questions will be raised about the implications of platform education for democracy, equity and public values.
The main innovativeness of this research consists in the selected field of inquiry, i.e. "platform education" as all teaching, learning, governance, etc. that is mediated and made operational through online platforms. Digitisation is arguably the most important arena of social change in the 21th century and platformization processes in education are most relevant indeed for their ability to impregnate social practices on all levels. In such a framework, it seems therefore necessary to carry out in-depth explorations of digital platforms and their implications for formal, non-formal and informal education and learning. It will then be possible to analyse the social effects of platform education and untangle any threat to equality and democracy they may conceal.
First of all, a map will be provided of the most important digital platforms for governance, e-learning and open learning that have been developed and adopted by HE providers in Europe and in the world.
Second, a critical reflection will be set on the potential of digital platforms as tools for expanding and opening access to knowledge in HE. What does the managerial, educational, organisational platformization of HE means for democratic societies? Platform education can indeed be considered as an arena of ambivalence between education and learnification (Biesta, 2005), public governance and commodification, HE as a common good (Marginson, 2016) and as private property. The rhetoric of digital platforms is frequently put forward with a techno-euphoric and hypermodernist drive, but vulnerabilities still might emerge with respect to reflexivity efforts. Do platforms foster the co-participation of students and teachers in the construction of knowledge? Do they rather contribute to the affirmation of marketization, standardisation, rationalisation?
I will further enquire whether and how the platformization of HE might translate over time into the mobilisation and (social) construction of knowledges and competencies which may affect curricula and educational policy and practice overall.
Finally, I will muse on how the European space of (higher) education will look like after this platform deluge. Where is HE platformization leading to, and which forms of (re)production of inequalities will it conceal? Which hidden cultures will it convey? How will teaching, learning, governing of education be performed? For whom? At what price? What it at stake, now?