Re-infrastructuring higher education

Abstract

Higher education is undergoing ‘digital transformation’ through the introduction of new digital platforms in processes and practices of research and teaching. This brief forum article explores how research and teaching in many regions are being ‘platformised’ by a combination of academic publishers, the edtech industry, and Big Tech firms. Together, these processes of platformising research and teaching are integrating universities into complex digital infrastructures for many of their central operations. Universities are being re-infrastructured. They are also being ‘assetised’ as control of platforms and infrastructures allows their proprietors to extract value from the HE sector. These developments call for concerted dialogue on the conditions and prospects of academic labour in the digital university, and close attention to how emerging technological devices and systems are integrated into, challenged or transformed by scientific and pedagogic practice.