9. Campus in the cloud

have questioned why there wasn’t more widespread consultation with faculty about this move and are worried about potential damage this partnership might bring to AU’s reputation.

Of course, AU is just one example of how ‘challenger universities’ might privatise the HE sector, and turn degrees into corporate profits. In October 2020, the global education business Pearson announced a partnership with Coventry University in the UK to run a new qualification ‘to give Pearson Higher National students access to a UK honours degree, as a seamless and integrated offer.’125 Awarded by the university, students will study for the qualification remotely through ‘Pearson Approved Centres’ within their home country. In this sense, the public-private partnership between Pearson and Coventry University outsources the provision of a degree to the commercial partner. We are not suggesting that these arrangements shouldn’t exist, and we recognise the need to expand HE access to more people at a lower cost. But, we think this provides an interesting case to explore how PPPs, mergers, acquisitions and integrations can work to hide or disguise profit making activities. Moreover, we need to examine how these aspirations for broader access are fulfilled. For example, are these courses actually taken up by individuals who would not otherwise access HE opportunities or those already following a HE path looking for cheaper, more flexible arrangements?

9. Campus in the cloud

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in rapid expansion of for-profit cloud infrastructures for universities. Indeed, there has been significant talk of HE institutions having to play ‘infrastructure catch up’ as they rapidly move to cloud systems that can handle the new demands of remote and hybrid delivery. Cloud solutions, like those offered by Google, include storage, analytics, big data, machine learning and application development.126 Instead of just using a cloud for email storage solutions, universities are now exploring the entire infrastructure of cloud computing:

Google solutions create the powerful computing infrastructure that keeps today’s higher ed communities humming. Researchers can speed up

125 Pearson. 2020, 26 October. Pearson and Coventry University collaborate to create integrated BTEC Higher National Degree proposition. Pearson blog: https://www.pearson.com/uk/about-us/news-and-policy/news/2020/10/pearson-and-coventryuniversity-create-integrated-btec-hn-degree.html 126 Google. Powering possibilities with Google Cloud: https://edu.google.com/products/google-cloud/?modal_active=none&storycard_activeEl=for-institutions

analysis from days to minutes, working seamlessly across departments and data sets. Students and faculty can collaborate easily and securely across disciplines and campuses. And campus staff can work more efficiently and effectively.127

There has been a particular push to adopt cloud systems that can provide online education solutions in which content can be developed, and delivered across very dispersed, large-scale networks. Such dispersed systems, which integrate student information systems, learning management systems, and a wide range of other third party learning platforms, are able to make diverse forms of data interoperable for largescale student analytics. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, launched new services and a price discount program in September 2020 for universities to develop ‘data lakes’ of very large volumes of heterogeneous information for machine learning analysis and visualisation on data dashboards.128 The process of ‘architecting a data lake for higher education student analytics’ involves the deployment of multiple AWS products and functionalities, including those for pulling student learning data from LMS providers such as AWS partners Canvas or Blackboard, and then utilising AWS programs for handling the ‘machine learning workload’ of analysis.129 This level of ‘architecting’ knits universities into the vast cloud infrastructures of AWS and into the very technical systems that underpin the rapid growth of the data economy. It anticipates the emergence of a new kind of ‘cloud campus’ that exists synchronously in global technology infrastructures and physical campus settings, and where the cloud has the potential to shape or determine on-campus action and decision making.

The cloud ‘bridge’

Alibaba Cloud claims it is the ‘number one cloud vendor in China’ with the ability to help businesses flourish in Mainland China with ‘guaranteed network quality’.130 To this end, Alibaba is being used as a ‘bridge’ between university portals and mainland Chinese students during the pandemic. This allows Chinese students to access content from the foreign universities they are enrolled in during a time when they are prevented from physically travelling to international campus locations. In the likes of Australia, where HE funding arrangements are reliant on international student fees, Alibaba has been instrumental in

127 Google. Creating new possibilities in higher education: https://edu.google.com/why-google/higher-ed-solutions/ 128 Nanjiani, N. 2020, 17 September. Building a data lake at your university for academic and research success. AWS Public Sector Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/building-data-lake-your-university-academic-research-success/ 129 Jordan, C. and Berkley, T. 2020, 22 October. Architecting a Data Lake for Higher Education Student Analytics. AWS Architecture Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/architecting-data-lake-for-higher-education-student-analytics/ 130 Alibaba. Alibaba Cloud: https://au.alibabacloud.com