Convenors

Dr Jeremy Knox, University of Oxford
Email:  jeremy.knox@education.ox.ac.uk

Dr Janja Komljenovic, The University of Edinburgh
Email:  j.komljenovic@ed.ac.uk

Janja and Jeremy are active researchers in this area with extensive networks.

Jeremy Knox is Associate Professor of Digital Education at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, and an Official Fellow of Kellogg College. His research interests include the relationships between education, data-driven technologies, and wider society, and he has led projects funded by the ESRC and the British Council in the UK. Jeremy has previously served as co-Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. His published work includes AI and Education in China(2023), Data Justice and the Right to the City (2022), The Manifesto for Teaching Online(2020), Artificial Intelligence and Inclusive Education (2019), and Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course (2016).

Janja Komljenovic is a Senior Lecturer in Education Futures at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include the digital economy, platform capitalism, and phenomena like digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of universities.

Network Outline

The purpose of this network is to bring together researchers and practitioners who are leading critical studies and debates on digitalising higher education. We unpack a range of key processes, such as platformization and datafication of universities, the constructing of institutional and cross-institutional digital ecosystems with user data flows, university staff and students as digital users, changing academic identities, changing labour and learning conditions, data rich processes (such as AI, ML, analytics), and emergence of digital assets. Much of these processes are new and are only in the making. In other words, digitalisation of the higher education sector is ongoing, and the education technology (edtech) industry is expanding with experiments on what works and what is useful. We are not only interested in studying these phenomena, but in contributing to good governance. Policy is only catching up with practice and we are yet to hold a democratic debate around what kind of edtech and what kind of digital university we want. Theoretically, we are diverse and draw from education studies, sociology, science and technology studies, policy studies, and philosophy.