Imagine preparing to design a course and beginning not with learning outcomes, disciplinary questions, or student needs, but with a pre-configured interface. The “course shell” is already scaffolded into weekly units. Each week contains placeholders for readings, a quiz, and a discussion forum. There are default settings for assessment deadlines, participation tracking, and gradebook calculations. Before any pedagogical thinking occurs, decisions about time, structure, interaction, and evaluation have already been made - by the platform.

This scenario is not hypothetical. It reflects the dominant workflow in many institutions, where Learning Management Systems (LMS) are positioned not as flexible tools but as normative frameworks. Templates are encouraged to ensure consistency. Features are “locked” to ensure compliance. Support staff are trained to assist within platform conventions, not outside them. The result is that educators are often nudged - gently but powerfully - toward designing to fit the system rather than designing to fit the learning.

This subtle reversal of priorities marks a profound shift in academic practice: the platform becomes the starting point and pedagogical imagination must retrofit itself accordingly. The LMS, though ostensibly a neutral container, functions as a curriculum-shaping actor. It defines what is easy, what is visible, what is assessable, and therefore, what is normal. Over time, its default structures begin to stand in for pedagogical reasoning. Multiple-choice tests become the go-to assessment not because they are pedagogically sound, but because they integrate smoothly into the system. Weekly folders become the de facto organisation of learning, not because they match the rhythms of inquiry, but because that is how the LMS expects content to be delivered.

This dynamic risks producing what might be called platformed pedagogy - a mode of teaching shaped more by system affordances than by educational values. It is a pedagogy of convenience and compliance, one that too often constrains innovation rather than enabling it. And while the LMS may make course setup more efficient, it can also make it less reflective. The more we internalise the logic of the tool, the less likely we are to question its premises.

This is not a rejection of the LMS as a category of technology. Many platforms offer real benefits: organisational clarity, access to resources, and support for certain types of learning at scale. But these benefits come at a cost if the platform’s design is allowed to substitute for pedagogical deliberation. The danger is not that we use the LMS, but that we allow it to teach us - quietly, pervasively - how to teach.

The first step in reclaiming pedagogical agency is to notice this influence. To ask: where is this structure coming from? What assumptions underlie this feature? Who benefits from this configuration, and what alternatives are being foreclosed? When the tool becomes the teacher, educators must respond not by rejecting it outright, but by reasserting their role as critical designers of learning. This means treating the platform not as an invisible infrastructure, but as a pedagogical interlocutor - one whose logic must be interpreted, challenged, and, where necessary, rewritten.

The term hidden curriculum refers to the implicit lessons, norms, and expectations that educational environments convey to learners outside the formal, intended content of instruction. These are the unspoken rules embedded in routines, policies, technologies, spatial arrangements, assessment structures, and behavioural expectations. While the explicit curriculum might focus on developing knowledge and skills, the hidden curriculum socialises students into particular roles, values, and dispositions that often go unquestioned but profoundly shape educational experience and identity.

The concept gained prominence through the work of Bowles and Gintis (1976), who argued that schools function not merely to educate but to reproduce the social relations of production. They claimed that the hierarchical structures of schooling - such as authority relationships between teachers and students, the fragmentation of the school day into subjects and periods, and the emphasis on punctuality and obedience - mirror those of the workplace in capitalist economies. In this view, schools condition students for compliance, punctuality, docility, and deference to authority, preparing them not for critical citizenship but for subordinate roles in the labour market. Learning, then, becomes less about intellectual or ethical development and more about habituation to control.

Ivan Illich (1971) took this critique further, arguing in Deschooling Society that institutionalised education itself serves to perpetuate a culture of dependency and credentialism. For Illich, the hidden curriculum operates not just within the school but as a societal structure that undermines informal, self-directed, and socially meaningful forms of learning. The school, in his analysis, teaches people that learning is a scarcity controlled by experts, that knowledge is a commodity, and that education is something dispensed by authorities rather than discovered through human interaction and lived experience. The hidden curriculum, in this sense, is inseparable from the institutional logic of schooling as a form of social control.

Henry Giroux (1983) reconceptualised the hidden curriculum from a critical pedagogical perspective, arguing that it is a site of ideological struggle. Rather than viewing students as passive recipients of ideology, Giroux posited that the hidden curriculum is an arena where dominant cultural values - such as individualism, competition, nationalism, and compliance - are normalised. However, he also saw it as a space that could be interrogated and contested. For Giroux, critical educators must make the hidden curriculum visible and challenge its assumptions in order to cultivate democratic consciousness and social justice. This involves not only analysing what is taught, but how, why, and in whose interests.

In digital contexts, the hidden curriculum persists - and arguably intensifies. The architecture of Learning Management Systems, the datafication of student behaviour, and the automation of assessment practices encode and transmit unspoken values of efficiency, surveillance, standardisation, and algorithmic authority. These environments often frame learning as a series of discrete, trackable tasks; they encourage instrumentalism over inquiry, completion over reflection, and individual performance over collective dialogue. The hidden curriculum of digital platforms thus merits the same critical scrutiny as the classroom policies and institutional hierarchies that concerned earlier theorists.

To understand the hidden curriculum in contemporary learning environments is to ask: What kinds of behaviours, relationships, and forms of knowledge are being quietly rewarded or discouraged? And more urgently: Whose interests are served by these implicit lessons? Critical pedagogy demands that we not only ask such questions but that we reshape our environments so that the hidden curriculum works in service of justice, curiosity, and human flourishing rather than managerialism and compliance.

One of the most insidious aspects of the hidden curriculum in Learning Management Systems (LMS) is how specific platform features, often introduced as neutral tools to enhance learning or reduce administrative burden, come to signal implicit pedagogical values. These features do not simply support teaching; they subtly direct it. Their affordances and constraints communicate powerful messages about what learning is, how it should be demonstrated, and who gets to decide what counts.

Quizzes and Auto-Marking

Automated assessments such as multiple-choice quizzes and auto-marked tests are frequently embedded as default components of LMS environments. While they offer convenience and scalability, their pedagogical implications are significant. These formats privilege recall and recognition over reasoning, discouraging students from engaging in complex or ambiguous tasks. The underlying message is clear: knowledge is a fixed set of facts to be retrieved, not something to be interrogated, constructed, or applied creatively. Moreover, students quickly learn to approach learning as a strategy of guessing the “correct” answer rather than developing a sustained argument or perspective.

Gradebooks and Analytics Dashboards

LMS dashboards and gradebooks render student activity into visible, quantifiable data - time on page, number of logins, assignment completion rates. These metrics are then fed back to teachers, administrators, and sometimes students themselves, creating a feedback loop of surveillance and self-monitoring. The implied pedagogy here is one of productivity and performance: good learners are those who are visible, trackable, and compliant. This data-driven framing narrows the meaning of engagement, obscuring forms of intellectual labour that are slow, reflective, or emotionally complex. It also risks shifting the educator’s focus from qualitative insight into student understanding toward managerial oversight of student behaviour.

Content Gating and Linear Progression

Another feature often embedded in LMS design is the sequencing of learning through locked content and prerequisite tasks. This linear and conditional logic structures learning as a one-way journey through predefined checkpoints. While this can help ensure progression, it also constrains student autonomy and creativity. Learners cannot explore topics out of sequence, revisit earlier material freely, or take ownership of their learning trajectory. The pedagogical signal is clear: education is about following instructions, not asking questions. Such rigid structures contradict the open-ended, recursive, and non-linear nature of deep learning.

Discussion Boards

Discussion forums are often the main (or only) interactive space provided within LMS platforms. Despite their potential, they are frequently implemented in ways that inhibit genuine dialogue. Threaded posts tend to encourage one-off replies rather than sustained interaction. The hierarchical layout often prioritises initial posts over responses, and the asynchronous nature can diminish the sense of immediacy and connection. In many cases, these forums are used primarily for compliance - participate to earn a mark - rather than for exploratory conversation. The result is a pseudo-dialogue: structured, polite, but ultimately unengaged. Students perform participation rather than experience it.

Pedagogical Implications

Each of these features - quizzes, dashboards, gating, and discussion boards - carries with it an implicit pedagogy. They communicate values such as efficiency, compliance, order, and surveillance. While these may support certain kinds of instructional goals, they often do so at the cost of educational values like curiosity, criticality, dialogue, and trust. The LMS, in this sense, becomes more than a tool: it becomes a teacher, silently instructing students and educators in how to behave, what to prioritise, and what to disregard.

Recognising these signals is the first step toward reclaiming agency. Educators can begin to read the platform critically, identifying which features align with their pedagogical commitments and which need to be resisted, subverted, or reimagined. Only by making the hidden visible can we begin to push back against the narrowing of educational possibility encoded in our digital tools.

The pedagogical signals encoded in LMS platforms are not neutral - they are internalised by both students and educators in ways that shape how teaching and learning are experienced, enacted, and evaluated. These effects accumulate over time, producing shifts not only in practice but in mindset.

Learner Behaviour: From Inquiry to Instrumentalism

Students quickly learn to adapt to the behavioural expectations embedded in the LMS. When learning is presented as a sequence of tasks to complete, checklists to satisfy, and grades to accumulate, the emphasis shifts from inquiry to instrumentalism. Engagement becomes synonymous with visibility: logging in regularly, clicking through content, submitting assignments on time, contributing formulaic responses to discussion boards.

This behaviour is not the result of apathy or disengagement on the part of students - it is often a rational adaptation to a system that rewards efficiency, predictability, and conformity. Over time, this can erode intrinsic motivation. Curiosity, experimentation, and intellectual risk-taking are replaced by risk-aversion and surface learning. Students may begin to ask not “What can I learn?” but “What do I need to do to pass?”

Such dispositions are reinforced by constant exposure to dashboards, performance analytics, and feedback loops that quantify learning into metrics. When the primary message is that success equals completion and compliance, students are less likely to see themselves as co-creators of knowledge and more as consumers of content and points.

Teacher Agency: Constrained Creativity and Invisible Labour

Educators, too, are shaped by the platforms they use. While many LMS features are marketed as enablers of innovation or time-saving efficiencies, in practice they often delimit what can be taught, how it can be assessed, and how learning relationships can be cultivated.

Course templates, rigid assessment tools, and prescriptive workflows can have the effect of standardising pedagogical approaches across departments or institutions, even when such standardisation conflicts with disciplinary or pedagogical values. Educators may find themselves modifying their teaching not to better serve learners, but to make it fit within the bounds of what the platform allows - or what technical support can feasibly maintain.

Moreover, the hidden labour of adapting to the LMS - learning its interface, troubleshooting issues, configuring tools, working around design limitations - is rarely recognised as academic or pedagogical work. Instead, it becomes a form of infrastructural maintenance that consumes time and energy without visibility or reward.

These constraints can foster a sense of pedagogical disempowerment. Rather than designing for educational possibility, teachers may feel as though they are configuring within a system. The LMS becomes not a partner in pedagogy but a procedural frame that must be negotiated or endured.

A Recursive Relationship

Crucially, the relationship between learner behaviour and teacher agency is recursive. When platforms reward surface-level participation, teachers may lower their expectations accordingly. When educators design for compliance - because it is easier to manage, assess, or track - students respond in kind. The platform becomes the mediator of trust between student and teacher, often replacing rather than supporting the human relationships at the heart of learning.

Recognising this dynamic is key. It is not enough to blame students for being disengaged or teachers for being uncreative. The infrastructure itself must be interrogated as a co-actor in pedagogical design and decision-making. Only when we reclaim space for reflection, dialogue, and imagination - on both sides of the learning relationship - can we begin to undo the subtle but powerful constraints the LMS imposes.

The design and functionality of Learning Management Systems are not merely technical or logistical choices - they are ideological structures that shape how teaching and learning are conceptualised, experienced, and governed. To treat the LMS as a neutral delivery mechanism is to overlook the values, assumptions, and power relations encoded in its very architecture. In this way, digital infrastructure becomes a silent curriculum: it teaches, governs, and disciplines, often without naming its influence.

Infrastructure always embodies decisions about what matters. What is made visible and what is hidden? What is tracked and what is ignored? Who is empowered to act, and under what conditions? When platforms default to linear progressions, time-limited assessments, centralised control, and extractive data practices, they are not simply enabling education - they are scripting it according to particular logics. These logics are frequently managerial: privileging control, standardisation, efficiency, and scalability over ambiguity, relationality, and care.

Audrey Watters (2021), in her historical critique of educational technologies, argues that tools marketed as innovations often reproduce the same patterns of control and compliance that have long defined institutional education. Her account of “teaching machines” - from Skinner’s mechanical devices to contemporary adaptive platforms - reveals a consistent thread: an attempt to automate instruction, monitor progress, and reduce the labour of teaching to pre-programmed responses. Beneath the rhetoric of efficiency lies a pedagogy of constraint.

Ben Williamson (2017) has explored how these tendencies are amplified in the datafied university. He documents how LMS systems and their analytics tools operate as instruments of governance, turning student behaviours into data points and feeding them into algorithmic systems of evaluation and prediction. In this environment, learning is not interpreted, it is computed. The platform becomes not just a site of education but a policy device - reshaping what counts as success, engagement, or risk through its metrics.

Chris Gilliard (2017) situates this dynamic within the broader context of platform capitalism. He warns that the logic of surveillance - so familiar in commercial social media - has crept into education under the guise of learning analytics, proctoring software, and behaviour-monitoring tools. The LMS becomes a node in a surveillance infrastructure that compromises student autonomy, chills experimentation, and imposes a regime of visibility. Students and teachers alike are rendered legible to institutional scrutiny, their behaviours continuously tracked, reported, and acted upon.

These ideological tendencies are often framed as solutions. Platform vendors and institutional procurement teams emphasise terms like “student success,” “retention,” “personalisation,” and “quality assurance.” But these terms are frequently proxies for control: to personalise is to predict; to assure quality is to standardise; to improve retention is to manage attrition risk. These imperatives shift pedagogical responsibility away from human relationships and toward automated enforcement.

Understanding infrastructure as ideology means recognising that every feature and interface embeds a worldview - about learners, teachers, knowledge, and education itself. The LMS teaches us not just how to deliver a course, but how to think about learning. And when its values go unexamined, they quietly become our own.

The challenge, then, is not merely to use these systems better, but to ask: what kind of educational infrastructure would reflect our highest pedagogical aspirations? What would it mean to design for dialogue instead of data? For care instead of compliance? For justice instead of just-in-time delivery?

If we accept that current learning platforms encode and perpetuate a hidden curriculum of control, standardisation, and surveillance, then we must also ask what a radically different digital learning environment might look like. What would it mean to build platforms not around compliance but around conversation - not to monitor behaviour, but to foster understanding?

A dialogic digital environment starts from the premise that learning is not a product to be delivered but a relationship to be cultivated. It is an inherently social, interpretive, and open-ended process that thrives on plurality, dissent, and collaboration. Designing for this kind of learning means making space for multiple voices, for uncertainty, for moments of pause and reflection that resist the relentless pace and orderliness of most digital tools.

Promoting Student Agency and Co-Creation

Rather than presenting learners with pre-structured paths and locked-down content, dialogic platforms would enable students to shape their own learning journeys. This might include the ability to remix materials, propose alternative assignments, or initiate peer-led projects. Agency is not simply about choice within constraints, but about meaningful participation in shaping the learning environment itself. Tools that foreground annotation, contribution, and remixability - such as Hypothes.is, Wikis, and collaborative writing platforms - better reflect this ethos than traditional LMS modules.

Encouraging Open-Ended Inquiry and Critical Dialogue

Dialogue is not the same as discussion. It is not a forum post written to tick a participation box, nor is it a chat window embedded at the margins of a video. Dialogue in a pedagogical sense involves the mutual exploration of meaning, sustained over time, shaped by listening as much as by speaking. To support this, platforms must allow for temporal flexibility, non-hierarchical conversation threads, and spaces where students and staff can engage as co-learners. Tools like Discourse, Flarum, and Loomio - as well as collaborative annotation tools such as Hypothes.is and Marginalia - offer more dialogic possibilities than the rigid Q&A model of most LMS discussion boards. These platforms support open-ended, non-hierarchical dialogue, allowing learners to co-construct knowledge through ongoing, participatory interaction. Their design encourages mutual inquiry rather than transactional posting, making them better suited to pedagogies grounded in critical dialogue and co-authorship.

Designing for Flexibility, Not Compliance

Authentic learning rarely follows a linear, modular progression. It loops, spirals, stalls, and restarts. Dialogic digital environments would reflect this by enabling non-linear navigation, emergent curriculum pathways, and adaptive timelines based on negotiation rather than automation. Instead of gating content based on prior completions, platforms could offer branching possibilities and scaffolded reflection, where learners choose their direction based on evolving interests and understanding.

Embedding Ethics and Inclusivity from the Ground Up

A dialogic platform must also be an ethical platform. It must safeguard privacy, reject surveillance, and resist data extraction. It must be accessible not only in compliance with technical standards but in ways that recognise the diverse identities, abilities, and contexts of its users. This requires intentional design that prioritises the margins - not as exceptions to be accommodated, but as central to how the platform understands pedagogy. Participatory design, where students and educators co-develop technologies with designers, is essential here. This is not a luxury add-on - it is the precondition of just and effective digital education.

Building Infrastructure That Listens

To build dialogic platforms is also to build platforms that listen - to the communities that use them, to the pedagogical values they embody, and to the social conditions in which they operate. Open-source ecosystems provide one way forward: not simply as cost-saving alternatives, but as spaces of governance where educators and learners have a say in how their tools evolve. Community-driven projects such as MoodleNet, H5P, and federated platforms for social learning - like Mastodon, and WriteFreely - challenge the top-down logic of proprietary systems. These platforms are decentralised by design, allowing institutions, educators, or learners to host and govern their own nodes while remaining interoperable with others. They model an alternative to centralised control, offering greater pedagogical flexibility, autonomy, and ethical alignment with values such as privacy, transparency, and community ownership. They remind us that platforms, like pedagogy, can be participatory, provisional, and responsive.

Envisioning a dialogic digital environment is ultimately a political act. It is to refuse the inevitability of platform-determined education and to assert that better is possible - not through scaling the status quo, but through reimagining what digital learning could mean if we began with the values of dialogue, care, agency, and justice.

To resist the hidden curriculum of the LMS is to do more than reject a few interface quirks or grumble at inflexible workflows. It is to engage in a deeper act of pedagogical discernment - one that asks not only how we use digital tools, but what they are asking us to become. The LMS does not merely deliver content; it delivers a worldview. It teaches us to value quantifiable over qualitative, trackable over relational, efficient over ethical. To resist that worldview is to reclaim the right to define what learning means on our own terms.

Critical Examination as Pedagogical Practice

The first step in resistance is noticing. Educators must cultivate a critical attentiveness to the material conditions and technological environments in which they teach. This means reading the LMS not just as a tool, but as a text - one that encodes assumptions about authority, hierarchy, time, knowledge, and power. It means asking uncomfortable questions: Why is this platform structured this way? Whose needs does it prioritise? What does it silence, exclude, or render difficult?

This critical examination should not be seen as a purely individual burden. Institutions should foster spaces for collective reflection - among teaching staff, instructional designers, technologists, and students - on how digital tools shape learning relationships. Curriculum design workshops, platform reviews, and pedagogical communities of practice are all sites where such conversations can begin.

Critical Engagement and Reflective Adaptation

There may be times when educators, drawing on their professional expertise, determine that certain platform features or tools do not support the kind of learning they aim to foster. In such cases, thoughtful decisions about when to use, adapt, or set aside particular digital components are part of the pedagogical craft. These decisions are not about defiance, but about aligning tools with educational purpose - ensuring that technology serves learning rather than dictates it.

Engaging critically with platform features can also mean repurposing them in imaginative and pedagogically meaningful ways. A quiz tool, for example, might be used to prompt self-reflection or generate discussion rather than to assess factual recall. A discussion forum could be reimagined as a space for collaborative storytelling, peer review, or dialogic inquiry. The goal is not to reject digital infrastructure, but to work creatively within and around it - making room for practices that are dialogic, student-centred, and intellectually rich.

This kind of reflective adaptation is a valuable professional practice. It demonstrates an educator’s commitment to purposeful design and their responsiveness to the dynamics of teaching and learning. Institutions can support this work by creating space for dialogue, experimentation, and shared learning around digital pedagogy - recognising that platform use is not a technical decision alone, but a deeply pedagogical one.

Advocacy and Cultural Change

Beyond the classroom, resistance means advocating for technologies that are aligned with educational values. This includes lobbying for ethical procurement policies, open-source alternatives, inclusive design practices, and meaningful staff-student co-design processes. It involves challenging narratives of digital inevitability - the assumption that technological change is always progress, and that educators must simply adapt.

Such advocacy must also extend to resisting managerial cultures that treat education as a system to be audited rather than a relationship to be nurtured. It requires confronting the instrumentalism that sees teaching as a series of deliverables and students as data points. These are not merely technical questions - they are political ones.

A Pedagogy of Reclamation

Ultimately, resisting the hidden curriculum means building a pedagogy of reclamation. It means reclaiming time for reflection in a culture of urgency, reclaiming dialogue in spaces designed for one-way delivery, reclaiming care in systems optimised for compliance. It means insisting that pedagogy is not a logistical layer to be automated, but the ethical and intellectual heart of education.

This resistance is not nostalgic. It does not aim to return to a mythical past free of mediation or standardisation. Rather, it is forward-facing: an invitation to imagine - and build - digital learning environments that are worthy of our highest educational hopes. Environments that make room for students and teachers to not only be seen, but to be heard, to be respected, and to be changed by one another in the process of learning.

To resist the hidden curriculum is to declare: this is not the only way education can be. And more importantly, it is not the way it must be.

• Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. London Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Giroux, H.A. and Penna, A.N. (1983). Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum. In: H.A. Giroux and D.E. Purpel (eds.) The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education: Deception or Discovery? Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, pp. 100–121.
• Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling Society. London: Calder & Boyars.
• Watters, A. (2021). Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Williamson, B. (2017). Big Data in Education: The Digital Future of Learning, Policy and Practice. London: SAGE Publications.
• Gilliard, C. (2017). Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms. EDUCAUSE Review. Available at https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/7/pedagogy-and-the-logic-of-platforms