Digital technologies are now interwoven in the very fabric of our everyday lives: from health to environment, from research to clinic, from media to politics, from economy to gender, from bank accounts to online purchases, from spiritual life to gym activities. Our personal and professional worlds are entangled in increasingly complex knots of digital technoscientific knowledges. Space and time are all but unaffected by these changes, as miniaturized mobilities (Elliott & Urry, 2010) enact new hybrid arrangements in which spatialities and temporalities shrink, stretch and overlap.

The phenomenon of digitalisation is emerging in education too. Its growing importance has been discussed in terms of a digital governance of education (Landri, 2018) that is being fabricated and enacted across Europe and beyond. Digital technologies are relevant to the fields of school (Selwyn et al., 2016), higher education (Williamson, 2018), lifelong learning (Romito et al., 2019).

Digitalisation processes are increasingly mediated by and made operative through digital platforms accessible via electronic devices. The concept of ‘platform society’ has thus been introduced to stress the inextricable relationship between online platforms and social processes (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Platforms are programmable architectures designed to order interaction among users and aimed at the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, circulation and monetization of user data (ibid., 13). They rely on three mechanisms: datafication (the conversion of social action into digital data), commodification (the transformation of online and offline objects, activities, emotions into commodities), selection (the triggering and filtering of user activity through algorithms). Hence, platforms cannot be considered as mere technical or economic phenomenona – they are social and political spaces that mediate and generate practices. They can indeed be considered as artefacts having agency, capable of penetrating life, shaping the world, exercising power (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014).

Platforms operate in disparate fields, such as tourism, news, health, mobility, administration, and education. Platform education thus concerns the processes of learning, teaching and governance as they are mediated by and enacted through digital platforms. Education platforms are not neutral: they are inscribed with values and they convey ideas about what education should be and do.

Higher Education (HE) is rapidly becoming digital and platformized, both in practice and in policy spheres. Distance learning involved HE since the first half of the 2000s and contributed to its expansion via various e-learning technologies – virtual universities, MOOCs, webinars, etc.

Now, twenty years after the Sorbonne Declaration, within the European space of education (Lawn & Grek, 2012) a new policy agenda is emerging which calls for greater recognition of such issues into HE. European Commission envisaged a HE Hub as part of its Digital Education Action Plan (EC 2018), while position papers advocating for open and digital HE were presented at the EHEA 2018 Conference by private associations such as the European MOOC Consortium[1].

Despite their growing importance, digital education platforms have scarcely been focused as «matters of concern»[2] (Latour, 2004). The aim of this contribution is thus to bring to the forefront the invisible work of digital platforms for higher education and to elaborate on their potential vulnerabilities. We will do so by following two steps.

First, an attempt will be made to describe some cases of HE platformization, with a particular focus on the Italian case. We will investigate on how HE governance and learning are mediated by and enacted through digital platforms.

Secondly, we will propose a speculative musing (Taylor, 2018) around platform education and raise critical questions about its possible implications for democracy. Potentialities of platform education as a new field of inquiry for the sociology of education will also be addressed.

[1] See http://www.ehea.info/cid101765/ministerial-conference-paris-2018.html.

[2] Relevant exceptions include, e.g., Landri, 2018; Decuypere, 2018.

We will begin this exploratory research with a mapping effort aimed at detecting institutional discourses and empirical examples of platform education in Europe and throughout the world. We will then focus on two empirical dimensions that have been selected for describing relevant features of platformized HE and comparing Italian HE trends with European and global ones. The first empirical field concerns the platformization of HE managerial processes. We will inquire into CINECA, the major Italian HE management platform provider. Since 1990 CINECA provides intra-institutional services (management software for governance, students, staff, human resources), as well as e-learning solutions, a research-related repository platform, e-vote utilities and IT consulting (Luglio & Bertazzoni, 2010). An Italian translation of international research data information system standards will also be discussed. By analysing these cases through documentary analysis, netnography and exploratory interviews, we will show how Italian HE participates in global New Public Management trends. The second empirical field concerns the platformization of higher education and learning, which we will investigate by focusing on two empirical cases. First, we will focus on the eleven Italian virtual universities, which emerged since 2004 from the private HE market and had to comply with standards imposed by the public sector. Virtual universities as a whole intercept very specific types of users and commonly provide education through particular e-learning platforms in the form of video-lessons, standardized tests and blended modes (Tait, 2008). Italy is a latecomer in this trend, as the first virtual university was founded in 1969 in the UK (Ryan et al. 2000). Documentary analysis will be used for sketching a brief history of the phenomenon. Users and infrastructures will be mapped, and interviews will be carried out. The second case study about the platformization of higher education and learning concerns EduOpen (Rui, 2016), an Italian MOOC platform founded in 2014 by a network of public actors (e.g., the Ministry of Education, University and Research; 17 Universities; the GARR national connectivity infrastructure for research) and private ones (e.g., CINECA, Blackboard, Paperlit). EduOpen is also part of the European MOOC Consortium. MOOCs emerged as a widespread phenomenon around 2008 and kept on expanding ever since (Yuan & Powell, 2013). We will draw on available methodological tools (De Rosa & Landri, 2012) and on an understanding of MOOC platforms as socio-technical devices (Decuypere, 2018) in order to analyse the EduOpen project. Interviews and n/etnographies will be carried out.

First, we expect to provide a provisional map of the most important digital platforms for governance, e-learning and open learning that have been developed and adopted by HE providers in Europe and in the world. Furthermore, we will set up a critical reflection on the potential of digital platforms as tools for expanding and opening access to knowledge in HE. Platform education can indeed be considered as an arena of ambivalences between education and learnification (Biesta, 2005), public governance and commodification, higher education as a common good (Marginson, 2016) and as private property. While the rhetoric of digital platforms is frequently put forward with a techno-euphoric and hypermodernist drive, vulnerabilities might still arise in terms of reflexivity. Do platforms foster the co-participation of students and teachers in the construction of knowledge? Or do they rather constitute a field of standardization and rationalization? Lastly, we will argue for platform education as a new critical field of engagement for sociology of education. Digital platforms for education might in fact represent a stimulating issue for mobile sociologies of education (Landri & Neumann, 2014) interested in overcoming traditional boundaries and exploring phenomena with a renewed sensibility. A specific concern in such forms of construction, mediation and control of knowledge might thus contribute in giving new steam to sociology of education and retuning it up.

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