Abstract
The advent of massive open online courses and online degrees offered via digital platforms has occurred in a climate of austerity. Public universities worldwide face challenges to expand their educational reach, while competing in international rankings, raising fees and generating third-stream income. Online forms of unbundled provision offering smaller flexible low-cost curricular units have promised to disrupt this system. Yet do these forms challenge existing hierarchies in higher education and the market logic that puts pressure on universities and public institutions at large in the neoliberal era? Based on fieldwork in South Africa, this article explores the perceptions of senior managers of public universities and of online programme management companies. Analysing their considerations around unbundled provision, we discuss two conflicting logics of higher education that actors in structurally different positions and in historically divergent institutions use to justify their involvement in public–private partnerships: the logic of capital and the logic of social relevance.
Highlights
Unbundling – the disaggregation of educational provision and its delivery, often via digital technologies – has promised to address inequalities and challenge elitism in higher education (Rizvi, Donnely, and Barber 2013; Craig 2015)
During March–October 2017, we interviewed over 30 senior managers of public universities and online programme management (OPM) providers
We argue, unbundling remains an instrument of marketisation of higher education privileging particular universities endowed with reputational capital and reproducing inequality
Summary
Senior managers of OPM providers used a number of orders of justification to provide rationales for partnering with public universities In interviews, they prioritised the industrial (productivity and employability), market (immediate and mid-term strategies of profit-making) and, to a lesser extent, inspiration (innovative aspects of digital technologies) orders. Senior Manager 1 of University Z feared rankings were used by the government to push HDIs to ‘farm students’ for wealthy high-ranked HAIs. The link of the market order to unbundled provision was shared at University X, where Senior Manager 1 said ‘If income generated [through unbundled courses] improves our ability for teaching, research, or funding our students, I don’t mind how it’s raised’. Senior Manager 2 of University X emphasised the support that poorly prepared students could get through OPM providers, which could have an ‘extremely efficient support regime ... people, real humans by way of phones, emails and chat-rooms, enable them ... to get an awful lot of students succeeding, and having the motivation to continue’
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