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Universities and unicorns: building digital assets in the higher education industry

Wednesday, 3 February 2021 , 2pm

CEPA Research Seminar

Dr Janja Kolmjenovic, Lancaster University &

CEPA Visiting Professor Sam Sellar, Manchester Metropolitan University

Join via Zoom

The increasing speed, scope, and extent of marketisation has led key education scholars to conceptualise it as a global industry (Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016). The use of technology to transform teaching and learning, which has expanded dramatically over the past year, and the profound digitalisation of universities more broadly, has led to universities collecting and processing unprecedented amounts of digital data. As a result of these developments, Education Technology (EdTech) companies have become key players in the HE industry and we are witnessing a widespread change from creating value via market exchange towards extracting value via the ownership and control of data as assets. 

In this seminar, we will introduce a new ESRC-funded project in which we are pursuing a theoretically and empirically transformative approach to understand emerging HE markets and their implications for the HE sector. The project aims to create new knowledge about the forms and ways in which digital data and digital innovations are being monetised, how, by whom and why. The project combines qualitative case studies of investors, companies and universities, deliberative focus groups with stakeholders, public consultation, and quantitative database analysis of EdTech investment trends in higher education. We are planning to facilitate important discussions about potential regulations that are needed to govern the digitalising higher education industry and provide a clear theoretical rationale for value construction in the digital economy. Our presentation will focus on the project rationale and approach, and we will share early theoretical developments informing the research design and forthcoming fieldwork.

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