With schools having to switch to remote teaching during the pandemic, digital education platforms enabled to re-establish the missing contact between teachers and students although in a restricted way. With it, the lockdown boosted the digitalisation of school infrastructure and organisation. Digital education platforms form a browser-based, technical infrastructure that provides tools for exchange and cooperation. Platforms are imbued with the metaphor of the ecosystem that alludes to openness and blurred boundaries, communities, and horizontal cooperation (Kerres, 2017). With options to personalise the provision of educational material, platforms meet with pedagogical reform trends that promote student-centred teaching approaches with (overlapping) concepts of individualised, self-regulated, or self-directed learning. Advocates of digitally supported personalised learning promise that it supports students to “demonstrate such 21^st-century skills as communication, collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity” and “empowers students to take true ownership of their education, altering the dynamic between teachers and student” (Grant & Basye, 2014, pp. 1-2). However, empirical research into how platforms shape the social organisation of classroom and schools remains largely a desideratum (Decuypere et al 2021).  From a socio-material perspective, platforms act as intermediaries that, through their architecture, design and functions, enable, channel, and regulate the exchange between actors (ibid.). Critical ethnographic studies indicate that platforms allow an intensified hierarchical control over students and teachers, bureaucratic accountability, and panoptic self-surveillance (Williamson 2017; Selwyn 2011; Selwyn et al., 2017, Laursen 2020). Inspired by these research approaches, our contribution asks how digital platforms transform organisational practices in classrooms and schools. Thereby, we focus on schools that use platforms to support innovation-driven classroom settings. Between the imperative of openness and the dangers of increased control, we are interested in how platforms shape social relations in these schools.  

The paper is based on an ethnographic project that studies the social dimensions of personalised learning settings and analyses first insights from an exploratory study on the innovative-driven use of digital platforms in Swiss schools (Hangartner et al. in print). The mixed method approach of the later includes online and document research, expert interviews and ethnographic case studies. By interviewing experts of digitalisation in teacher training colleges, educational ministries and platform operators, we aim to generate an overview of the present-day operation of platforms in Swiss schools. Furthermore, these interviews will provide insights into the discourses on how digital education platforms may contribute to innovation in teaching and learning. Subsequently, the use of digital platforms in reform-oriented classrooms, e.g. including personalised and collaborative learning arrangements, will be examined by short field visits in 6-8 selected schools. To do so, we will observe exemplary classroom practices and conduct individual and group interviews with teachers, teacher experts for digitalisation as well as school leaders.

Based on these exploratory enquiries, we will discuss how platforms intervene in and transform organisational practices and thus teachers’ work and their social relations in schools. Expected insights relate to questions such as the following: How far do the digital tools support the personalisation of content or to what extent does it strengthen a bureaucratisation of classroom organisation? To what extent do the platforms encourage what forms of exchange and cooperation, between pupils or teachers? What are the effects on the use of digital tools for the classroom as a public space? Furthermore, we will reflect on how the sociality of digital platforms could be researched through an in-depth ethnographic research approach.

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