Over recent decades, education has been reframed as a crucial component of economic health within the postindustrial context of the new capitalism, in which the primary sources of value are ideas, understanding, and intellect rather than physical and tangible assets (Sennett 2006; Moisio and Kangas 2016). Such a knowledge-based economy sees education primarily as a mechanism for enhancing human capital and an instrument of social and economic success. For example, a recent UK Government White Paper on Higher Education (BIS, 2016, 8–9) states:
Graduates are central to our prosperity and success as a knowledge economy. . . . Research indicates that a 1% increase in the share of the workforce with a university degree raises long-run productivity by between 0.2% and 0.5%; and around 20% of UK economic growth between 1982 and 2005 came as a direct result of increased graduate skills accumulation.
The World Bank’s Knowledge Assessment Methodology (World Bank Institute 2009, 1) identifies an educated population as a pillar of a knowledge economy in which people are required to “create and share knowledge, and to use it well.” Similarly, the European Commission has linked education and economic competitiveness since its founding documents in the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and this continues in its education and economic strategies to the present day (Dima et al. 2018). In the United States also, education policy has been dominated by the priorities of skills development to sustain international economic competitiveness (Engel and Siczek 2018).
Public policy concerns with economic growth in this context are commonly translated and transformed into distinctly educational problems (Simons and Masschelein 2008, 395). Future economic growth is seen as being based on the ability of countries to generate employment opportunities in high-value occupations, with education framed as the way to achieve this. Such instrumentalization of education is reflected in the recommendations of supranational bodies such as the European Commission and Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in their emphasis on collaborations of academics, business, and policymakers to generate and disseminate knowledge to meet the “needs of society.”
A tension is created here between the framing of higher education as an instrument for promoting economic growth and its social and critical function, which seeks to understand and address the implications of that growth (Zgaga 2009). Within the instrumental view, higher education loses the wider political and critical role that is independent of government and corporations, risking becoming complicit in the reinforcement of existing political and economic injustices (Gewirtz and Cribb 2013, 80).
Munro (2018) argues that threaded through the discourses that position higher education as an instrument of national or regional economic competitiveness is a second discourse, which sees it as an instrument for personal financial advantage. This latter role is commonly articulated in terms of the employability of graduates and the so-called graduate premium—the additional earning power gained by achieving a university degree. It is also firmly embedded in tertiary and higher education policy imperatives. The European Union’s Bologna process, for example, places employability at the center of higher education policy and purpose through the promotion of graduate attributes and a focus on the acquisition of in-demand skills and competencies (Sin, Tavares, and Amaral 2017). This supranational policy focus is also found in national policy discourses and institutional strategies (Gewirtz and Cribb 2013). In the United Kingdom, for example, the recent Augar Review of education after age eighteen and funding for England (Department for Education 2019) views the purposes of education in terms of national economic competitive advantage and personal financial benefit.
Recent UK government research found that the lifetime graduate premium for men was £168,000 and for women £252,000, compared to someone leaving education at age eighteen (Bolton and Hubble 2018). Internationally, the OECD (2018) found that the higher education systems in all member countries, with the exception of Austria, generated a graduate premium. The highest premiums were in Chile, at 264 percent, compared to 69 percent in the United States and 48 percent in the United Kingdom. Recent evidence from the United States, however, suggests a general flattening of the growth rate of the graduate premium (Ashworth and Ransom 2019).
Higher education institutions are thus understood as instruments of both national competitive advantage and individual aspiration, with knowledge being increasingly valued in instrumental terms (Selwyn 2014). Qualifications are seen as positional goods (Robertson and Olds 2018) that offer individuals a branded distinction in terms of future employability within higher-status occupations (Kretsos and Livanos 2016), while students themselves increasingly take a more instrumental approach to their studies, demanding greater perceived returns on their investment in education—the student as consumer (Walsh 2015).
The quest for qualifications here becomes an individual, and individualistic, response to the competitiveness and precariousness of modern working life (Tams and Arthur 2010). As John Warner (2018) argued on the Inside Higher Ed website, “Universities have come to understand themselves, at the highest levels, not as an investment for the public but as investment opportunities for one-percenters—with implications for everyone else.” The decision to attend college is indeed now often framed in the language of cost-benefit analysis for the individual student (Browne 2010; Department for Education 2019).
We argue here that higher education is widely seen as an instrument of national and individual economic success—but why is the resistance to this idea particularly emphasized in the Manifesto for Teaching Online? Indeed, Jenny Mackness, commenting on an earlier version of this manifesto, has asked, “Does any teaching need to be complicit with the instrumentalisation of education?” (Mackness 2015, emphasis added). But digital education is often identified as something that is particularly friendly to the instrumentalization of education in both policy and individual terms, and we argue here that this takes place in two ways. First, that discourses of “the digital” are tightly entangled with those of the knowledge economy and employability, as part of a wider instrumental perspective on technology in general. Second, that digital education is often seen as aligned with the corporatization of higher education.
Digital education is commonly presented as part of a package of measures to more closely align higher education teaching with the needs or demands of a labor market by privileging digital competence (Conrads et al. 2017; Rivera-Velez and Thibault 2015). For example, King and Boyatt (2015, 1273) frame the adoption of digital education in terms of a perceived work readiness of students so they “leave higher education with the technological skills they will require in the workplace.” Students are seen as expecting their higher education experiences to prepare them for digital work, and—in a context such as the United Kingdom, where only 50 percent of students believe their university experience has suitably prepared them for the digital workplace (Newman and Beetham 2017)—colleges oblige by requiring curricula and modes of teaching to include digital technologies. Digital education, especially as understood through the instrumental logic of “technology-enhanced learning” (Bayne 2015a), is enmeshed with notions of subordination to the knowledge economy.
The policy and popular discourses that align digital education with work readiness and employability in a digital economy present an example of the techno-instrumentalism that sees technology as a tool to be used for the realization of predefined political goals (Bayne 2015a; Hamilton and Friesen 2013). Technology is seen here as operating neutrally, “enabling the aims of educational endeavours but not influencing them” (Knox 2013b, 23), in this way echoing the instrumentalization of education itself as supporting the goal of national and individual economic success. Where technology is seen as merely a tool for delivering and enhancing education, it can only ever be valued for the extent to which it “works” or “enhances” a particular education practice or activity (Bayne 2015a; Knox 2013a). This sets digital education up perfectly as an instrument for the subordination of higher education to the demands of the knowledge-based society and the production of human capital.
Furthermore, digital education is also often understood as a gateway for the corporatization of higher education. Building infrastructure for digital education—for example, the implementation of learning management systems or lecture-recording technology—requires significant and visible monetary and other investments and so is generally dependent on top-down managerial change within universities (Singh and Hardaker 2017). As Noble (1998) pointed out in his early essay on “digital diploma mills,” this centralization and standardization of teaching technologies undermines some long-held values in universities, such as the devolvement of decision-making, academic autonomy, and the ability for academics to be responsive, flexible teaching practitioners.
Digital education is often assumed to enable universities to generate surplus by delivering more education at less cost. Munro (2018) highlights how assumptions of cost efficiencies derived from investments in digital technologies are embedded in higher education policies in the United Kingdom through unproven assumptions of reduced teaching and assessment costs, reuse of learning materials and digital artifacts, and general economies of scale. Such assumptions can be found elsewhere, including Australia (Buchanan 2011) and North America, where, Veletsianos and Moe (2017) argue, US federal policy discourses promote digital education on this basis.
Digital education is thus commonly entangled with the emergence of market-based rather than state-owned higher education (Veletsianos and Moe 2017) and commonly seen as a strong element of the disaggregation, or unbundling, that enables new for-profit providers to enter the sector (McMillan Cottom 2017; Williamson 2015). These may include specialist education service providers such as Pearson or Laureate, for-profit colleges such as the University of Phoenix, new platform entrants such as Udacity, and the megacorporations: Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft (Walsh 2015). Digital technologies, and the promise they appear to offer for the efficient, profitable delivery of teaching at scale, have been readily aligned with the marketization of higher education and the reshaping of higher education to replicate the private sector.
However, we argue that digital education has a responsibility to be more explicit in its critical noncomplicity with such instrumental logics. Throughout this book, we aim to describe and map how we might do this through the practice of teaching. As just one example, Ross (2016) develops an approach that pushes back on techno-instrumental visions of maximal efficiency and profit by valuing the idea of a digital that welcomes uncertainty, risk, and complexity. Ross and Collier (2016) identify and celebrate the messiness involved in codeveloping online learning with students, nurturing multimodal and collaborative writing, working with the endless possibilities of the open Web, and other similar pedagogical possibilities that work best online. In the uncertainties of change and innovation can also be found the sources of hope for different and better education.
It is through such approaches that we can begin to engage in speculative explorations of alternative assemblages of digital education practice, building points of resistance to the dominant instrumental logics of how digital education is often used, and point toward ways in which it might be practiced otherwise. Online teaching need not be complicit with the instrumentalization of education.