1. Reimagining Higher Education

Key Issues

In this section we highlight the key issues that have emerged from the mapping exercise. The headline finding is that the COVID-19 pandemic has been exploited as an emergency opportunity for private sector and commercial organisations to increase their penetration and influence in higher education. While the responses to the pandemic have clearly been regionally defined and context-specific, we have documented a range of ways in which higher education has been positioned as needing disruptive transformation at international scale, in ways that suggest the creep of ‘disaster techno-capitalism’ across the sector. Digitalisation in HE has become a key way in which public education may be further privatised and commercialised.

1. Reimagining Higher Education

The developments documented in this report demonstrate some significant ways in which the COVID-19 crisis has become the context for radical reimagining of HE at international scale. The social and technical imaginary of HE as a digitally-enhanced and data-intensive sector has become increasingly shared across different sectoral positions, national borders and organisations, from private consultancies, businesses and the media to international organisations and policy centres. A high-tech imaginary of HE is increasingly materialising through the widespread uptake of educational technologies and related digital products and data solutions services. Beyond the exceptional emergency circumstances of the pandemic, edtech is being normalised, rationalised and legitimised as an appropriate long-term strategy for the post-pandemic university, college and campus. As we were preparing this report, the Secretary of State for Education in England commissioned the regulatory body for HE, the Office for Students, to produce a review of the evidence on ‘Digital teaching and learning in English higher education during the coronavirus pandemic’.148 Introducing a call for evidence to inform the review, Sir Michael Barber claimed that existing evidence of ‘ingenuity and innovation’ in digital learning presented an ‘opportunity’ for long lasting change:

148 Office for Students. 2020, 3 September. Digital teaching and learning in English higher education during the coronavirus pandemic: Call for evidence. Office for Students publications: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/digitallearning/