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

Dr Katy Jordan, Lancaster University
Email: k.jordan@lancaster.ac.uk

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

Jeremy is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education (click here to view). He is currently Principal Investigator of the British Council-funded project Digital Education for Changemakers in Sub-Saharan Africa (click here to view). Jeremy’s research interests include the relationships between education, data-driven technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), and wider society.

Janja is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University and a Member of the Research Management Committee of the Centre for Global Higher Education. She is the Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project ‘Universities and Unicorns: building digital assets in the higher education industry’ (click here to view). Her research interests include the digital economy, platform capitalism, and phenomena like digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of universities. Katy is a Research Associate based in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. She is part of the FCDO and World Bank funded EdTech Hub, and also Principal Investigator of a current SRHE-funded research project focusing on assumptions about algorithm-mediated academic literature searches. Her research interests include the social media in higher education, digital scholarship, online academic networks, and educational technology.

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.