1st Edition
EdTech Inc. Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age
This book advances a critical political economy approach to EdTech and analyses the economic, political and ideological structures and social power relations that shape the EdTech industries and drive EdTech’s development and diffusion.
Particular attention is paid to the integration of EdTech with some of the most contentious developments of our time, including platformization and data-veillance, the automation of work and labor, and globalization-imperialism.
By using a political economy of communication approach, this book will be of value to anyone interested in the current transformations of capitalism, the State, higher education and online learning in the digital age.
Biography
Tanner Mirrlees is an associate professor of communications and digital media studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT).
Shahid Alvi is a professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT).
"Recent decades have seen a sustained political assault on education, stripping it of its wider social purpose and reducing it to a personal investment and instrumental training for work. The progressive application of digital technologies have played a central role in redefining teaching and learning. Based on a very clear political economy of communications framework, the authors of this book demonstrate in detail how innovations have served the wider neo-liberal reorganisation of contemporary capitalism. Anyone concerned with the construction of the future needs to read it and respond." -- Graham Murdock, Loughborough University and Vice President of the International Association of Communication and Media Research (IAMCR)
"This book offers a unique and timely study of the interrelationships between digital platform industries and higher education. It breaks new ground by providing a critical analysis of the latest information-communication technological trends in higher education from a political economy approach" -- Marko Ampuja, Tampere University and University of Helsinki
