Jeremy Knox is co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include the relationships between education, data-driven technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), and wider society, and he has led projects funded by the ESRC and the British Council. Jeremy’s published work includes critical perspectives on artificial intelligence, learning analytics, data and algorithms, as well as Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This includes the monograph Posthumanism and the MOOC: contaminating the subject of global education with Routledge, and the edited volume Artificial Intelligence and Inclusive Education: Speculative Futures and Emerging Practices with Springer. He is Associate editor of Postdigital Science and Education with Springer, and also co-convenes the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) Digital University network.
‘Always Be Closing’: the new economies of open education
This talk will explore the emerging political economies of education in a postdigital and postpandemic landscape, in which data-driven technologies and commercial companies now appear ubiquitous in mainstream educational activity. It will begin with an overview of the origins of digitally-mediated open education, highlighting prominent examples from the Open Education Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movements, underscoring themes of experimentation and community.
This will be contrasted with the recent development and circulation of data-driven services and platforms for education, which typically claim to offer new kinds of accessibility and scale, as well as ‘personalised’ and ‘adaptive’ systems which tailor educational content to individual students, and promise unprecedented forms of objectivity and precision. As such, this talk will foreground critical perspectives about the social relations, and in particular the relations of power, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of ‘open’ education technologies in our times.
