The student as user: mapping student experiences of platformisation in higher education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article builds on emerging accounts of the ‘student as user’ to explore platformisation in higher education from the perspectives of students. While existing scholarship on platformisation and assetisation has highlighted important concerns about the distribution of power and value in contemporary higher education, much of this literature privileges a top-down focus on the edtech industry or the workings of particular platforms at the expense of lived experience. Departing from this critique, I explore what platformisation looks and feels like in the lives of students by presenting ‘platform maps’ created and narrated by university students in Scotland. The accounts show how student agency is enabled, constrained and shaped by platformisation and how students come to depend on platforms in their everyday lives. In the process, students' lives and higher education more broadly become entangled with dynamics of platformisation in complicated and problematic ways.