z5259633 | M10A
WEEK 4 COMMENTARY – EDUTECH IN THE PANDEMIC UNIVERSITY
Perhaps the most provocative debate in Week 4’s course content is the tension that exists between the
over-reliance on pre-digital forms of learning that inform edtech (Castañeda & Selwyn 2018), and the
push for students to undertake employment-related (often STEM) subjects that fail to foster critical
thinking. The latter evokes a polarising debate that is mirrored across all dilemmas in edtech - to fund and
save the arts, or, as was aptly put in Kerisha’s poster (2020), to endorse the ‘career-ready’ discourse that
serves the capitalist economy. To be or not to be, indeed. The former is made all the more problematic in
light of this, wherein the increasing lack of critical thinking traditionally fostered in the arts has translated
into a failure to both uphold and progress the learning management systems and pedagogies that support
education in the technological sphere. That is, as digital tech spaces rapidly and blindly encroach on
learning environments, rather than marrying in a productive manner, edtech is divorced from any real
semblance of education. Former head of the Australian Education Union and NSW Teachers’ Federation,
Angelo Gavrielatios, dubs this the ‘Uberification’ of education - hastily digitising education as a sorry
replacement for quality teaching (Patty 2019).
It is clear that this tension is dialectical in nature and speaks to the commercialisation of higher education
and the pervasive market influence of capitalism. As Ben Williamson posits, the role of higher education
is increasingly to “ensure continuous alignment with labour markets”, with education today being subject
to the same supply and demand curves that the economy traditionally monopolised. There is no question
why a recent report found that Ancient History and Extension English were the HSC subjects with the
biggest declines in enrolments over the past ten years (Chrysanthos 2020) - the influence of labour
markets has saturated higher education insomuch that it has permeated high school education. Ultimately,
the failure to build a progressive model of learning in line with technology beyond mere knowledge
transfer (Cooper 2020) both drives and is driven by an increasingly societal-wide fixation on the
commercial.
Beyond just trotting out a pro-arts rant, this issue can be extrapolated to the commodification of
knowledge itself. As evident both in the job-ready discourse, and in the nature of post-graduate research,
intellectualism has been subordinated to the commercial or strategic importance of the work produced, in
“a system that conflates market utility with intellectual value” (Cooper 2020). This brings to question the
value of knowledge today. No longer is education the domain of the learner, but rather a survival of the
fittest regime serving the capitalist agenda. Ultimately, what is unique to this issue is its cyclicality,
wherein perhaps we only need to address one to tackle the other. While education remains the last frontier
z5259633 | Ashleigh Lai | M10A
of technology, critically examining edtech in the context of education rather than markets can
complement, rather than constrain the opportunity to support both knowledge and economic progress.
REFERENCES
Amaral, MP, Steiner-Khamsi, G & Thompson, C 2019, Researching the Global Education Industry:
Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, Springer International Publishing:
Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Castañeda, L & Selwyn, N 2018, ‘More than tools? Making sense of the ongoing digitizations of higher
education’, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, vol. 15, no.
22, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-018-0109-y.
Chrysanthos, N 2020, The HSC subjects with plummeting enrolments revealed, The Sydney Morning
Herald, accessed 4 October 2020, plummeting-enrolments-revealed-20200930-p560m1.html>.
Cooper, S 2020, Last Chance for Universities?, ARENA, accessed 8 October 2020,
Goldstein, E 2020, Higher Ed Has a Silicon Valley Problem, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
accessed 8 October 2020, problem>.
Patty, A 2019, The 'Uberfication' of education: warning about commercial operators, The Sydney
Morning Herald, accessed 8 October 2020, uberfication-of-education-warning-about-commercial-operators-20181025-p50btw.html>.
Parkes, K 2020, The Algorithmic University and its Effect on Student Careers, Poster, accessed 10
October 2020, .
Trakakis, N N 2020, Wayne’s world: How universities are crushing academics, ABC, accessed 8 October
2020, it/12714252>.
Williamson, B 2020, ‘Making markets through digital platforms: Pearson, edu-business, and the
(e)valuation of higher education’, Critical Studies in Education, DOI:
10.1080/17508487.2020.1737556.