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Digital technologies are political machines of higher education post-pandemic reform. New report by me and @ahogie out this week on edtech, privatization and Covid. It's a bit long, so thought I'd thread a few points - here's a summary post too: https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2021/02/10/pandemic-privatization-digitalization-higher-education/
First point we make is that last year's pivot online became an opportunity for edtech and HE privatization and commercialization. This reflected longstanding multisector efforts to transform HE with tech, but also pandemic technosolutionism across sectors https://meatspacepress.com/
De-valuations of national economies from "learning loss" (reduction in skilled human capital) were mirrored by massive valuations of edtech, and efforts to capitalize on more of total global education expenditure https://www.holoniq.com/edtech/10-charts-that-explain-the-global-education-technology-market/
Platforms seized the opportunity. Learning management systems, MOOCs, online learning platforms etc had a bumper year. "Our funnels are filling" one CEO told his investors. Universities became the platforms they rented space on. That platforms got huge traffic, and data...
Coursera alone grew its users by 600% after bulk deals with universities. It published reports on its impact and quality based on 200million enrolments and half a petabyte of traffic a month. MOOCs were back, and had huge data to prove their point. https://about.coursera.org/press/insights/report-drivers-of-quality-in-online-learning-2020
Edtech also saw space opening up beyond universities, by going direct to consumers. Students or parents might pay for on-demand services, Netflix-style...
Course Hero, for example, made faculty into content producers selling educational materials to student consumers for extra income. A pure private transactional form of higher education, mediated by a platform operator with a billion dollar+ valuation. https://educators.coursehero.com/educator-exchange
All these expanding or new platforms in HE, though, needed the cloud too. AWS already had or signed deals with Canvas, Blackboard, Coursera and more. AWS became infrastructural to HE without its physical campus infrastructures.
Beyond being the infrastructural enabler of other HE platforms, AWS also discounted its "data lakes" architecture, enabling universities to pool and analyse large quantities of heterogeneous student data using its cloud and machine learning infrastructure.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/architecting-data-lake-for-higher-education-student-analytics/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/architecting-data-lake-for-higher-education-student-analytics/
