UP | HOME

eLearning

Random thoughts from an eLearning professional

Critical Infrastructure: Reimagining the Digital University

A retro-futuristic painting of a human and a robot seated at a console, gazing at each other, their hands near a glowing interface, evoking tension between organic and technological agency.

Opening Framing: Infrastructure as Ideology

In the context of higher education, digital infrastructure is often treated as a backdrop - something that enables teaching, assessment, and administration but does not directly shape them. This perception is not only misleading but politically consequential. As Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker (2006) famously argue, infrastructures are never neutral; they are sedimented expressions of historical choices, institutional norms, and ideological commitments. What appears as “just the way things work” is, in fact, the outcome of decisions about who and what matters, whose needs are prioritised, and what logics are privileged.

This insight matters deeply in the digital university, where infrastructures such as learning management systems (LMSs), virtual meeting tools, and productivity suites are often framed as merely technical choices. When a university adopts Microsoft Teams over open alternatives, or standardises on a particular LMS with fixed templates and workflows, these decisions are rarely understood as pedagogical in nature. Yet they shape how knowledge is delivered, how interaction is structured, and what forms of labour are valued. In other words, infrastructures do not just support pedagogy - they configure it.

As Edwards (2003) notes, infrastructures function as “knowledge-producing machines” that stabilise certain worldviews while rendering others invisible. In higher education, dominant platforms encode assumptions about efficiency, scalability, and control - assumptions aligned more closely with corporate logics than with the messier realities of critical, relational, or emancipatory education. The standardisation of assessment templates, the surveillance embedded in proctoring software, or the prescriptive structures of LMS discussion boards are not neutral tools - they reflect and reinforce particular visions of what education is for and how it should be conducted.

This framing leads us to the core question of this post: What kind of educational values are our infrastructures designed to serve? Are they rooted in trust, autonomy, and learner agency, or in monitoring, compliance, and institutional risk management? Do they foster dialogue and experimentation, or automate and constrain it? Recognising infrastructure as ideology invites us to reimagine the digital university not as a passive user of tools but as an active builder of worlds - worlds that can and must be shaped by educational values rather than purely technical or managerial imperatives.

The Platform University and Its Discontents

The contemporary digital university is increasingly shaped by what has been termed the “platform university” - a model of education that relies on centralised, proprietary technologies to manage, deliver, and assess learning. These systems are rarely neutral. As Williamson (2017) argues, the growing reliance on big data and digital platforms in education reflects a shift in governance towards metrics, automation, and performance monitoring. Such infrastructures embed logics of surveillance, efficiency, and control that reconfigure the very nature of academic labour, knowledge production, and pedagogy (Knox, 2020).

From Virtual Learning Environments like Canvas and Blackboard to institutional adoption of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, the digital infrastructure of higher education is predominantly built on commercial platforms whose primary design principles are not educational but economic. These systems promise scalability, standardisation, and administrative convenience. But in doing so, they also standardise pedagogical processes - enforcing rigid workflows, templated assessments, and interaction models that prioritise management over meaningful engagement (Selwyn, 2022; Costello et al., 2020).

Such platforms not only mediate communication and course delivery; they also enact a form of algorithmic governance. Features such as automated feedback, predictive analytics, and default rubrics contribute to what Knox (2020) terms machine behaviourism: the reduction of education to patterns of input and response, optimised for efficiency rather than relational complexity. While often framed as tools for personalisation, these systems can actually constrain learner agency by promoting opaque decision-making processes and privileging institutional control. As Tsai, Perrotta and Gašević (2020) argue, the implementation of learning analytics raises pressing concerns about transparency, equity, and the actual empowerment of students, particularly when data-driven interventions operate without adequate context or dialogue.

The implications for academic freedom and teacher autonomy are equally stark. In many institutions, educational technologies are procured and implemented with minimal input from teaching staff. Educators are expected to “embed” tools and analytics into their practice, even as these same systems constrain the very pedagogical agency required to teach responsively. As Slade and Prinsloo (2013) argue, the adoption of data-driven platforms in education often precedes critical reflection on their ethical, epistemological, and pedagogical foundations.

Moreover, the discontents of the platform university are not evenly distributed. Surveillance and automation disproportionately affect marginalised students - particularly those already subject to deficit framings or algorithmic bias in other domains. As Noble (2018) has shown, commercial data systems frequently reproduce racial and gendered hierarchies under the guise of neutrality. In education, such dynamics risk amplifying inequality under the banner of personalised learning or institutional accountability.

The platformisation of higher education thus entails more than the digitisation of existing practices. It represents a deeper restructuring of institutional logics and values - a shift from public good to platform service, from dialogue to dashboard. If universities are to resist this trajectory, they must critically interrogate the technological assemblages through which learning is now organised, and reassert pedagogy as the primary driver of digital strategy.

Alternative Infrastructures: Possibility and Precedent

The dominance of commercial platforms in higher education can make alternative digital infrastructures seem implausible or utopian. Yet, across education and adjacent domains, viable precedents exist that challenge the inevitability of proprietary systems. These alternatives do more than provide functional replacements; they embody different values - transparency, modularity, user control, and community governance - and open up radically different ways of thinking about what digital education can be.

Open-source educational tools offer a compelling starting point. Platforms like Moodle (modular and customisable learning management), BigBlueButton (privacy-conscious video conferencing), and H5P (interactive content authoring) are not just cost-effective; they are underpinned by principles of transparency, local adaptability, and community-driven development. Their source code is open to inspection and modification, giving institutions the ability to align infrastructure with pedagogical priorities rather than vendor roadmaps (Weller, 2014).

Beyond these, federated platforms represent a more radical departure from centralised models. Projects such as Mastodon (social networking), Nextcloud (file storage and collaboration), and PeerTube (video hosting) belong to the “Fediverse” - a constellation of interoperable platforms that resist platform monopolies by decentralising data and control. Instead of locking users into a single corporate system, these tools allow institutions or collectives to host their own servers while remaining connected to broader networks. This enhances data sovereignty and opens the door to alternative models of participation and governance, echoing broader historical efforts to reclaim network infrastructure as a site of democratic control and civil society action (Tréguer, 2017).

Community-led and cooperative initiatives further expand the horizon of possibility. Feminist approaches to technology design, as articulated by Bardzell (2010), emphasise ethics of care, participatory practice, and the situated needs of diverse users. These values are evident in the work of feminist tech collectives, which reject surveillance capitalism and prioritise intersectional inclusion and democratic governance. Platforms like May First Movement Technology and Collective Tools demonstrate how infrastructure can be shaped by political commitments to equity, solidarity, and the common good. These are not fringe experiments, but lived counter-models that foreground the infrastructural politics of participation.

Adjacent movements also provide fertile conceptual ground. In open science, infrastructure is recognised not merely as a technical concern but as a site of epistemic politics - raising questions about who gets to produce, share, and validate knowledge (Fecher and Friesike, 2014). Likewise, the civic tech community has long promoted the development of digital systems oriented toward the public good - emphasising transparency, citizen engagement, and institutional accountability (Wood, 2016). These examples show that alternative infrastructures are not hypothetical; they are already being built, maintained, and theorised across sectors.

What unites these examples is not just their technological architecture but their values architecture - a commitment to democratic design, ethical governance, and learner agency. They invite us to ask not merely what works, but who decides, who benefits, and what educational futures are being made possible or foreclosed.

Institutional Resistance and Structural Inertia

Despite the growing visibility of alternative digital infrastructures - open-source tools, federated platforms, and community-led technologies - these systems struggle to gain serious traction within mainstream higher education. This resistance is not simply the result of individual preferences or isolated technical limitations. Rather, it emerges from a complex entanglement of structural factors, institutional path dependencies, and deeply embedded ideologies of governance and risk.

Procurement bias plays a pivotal role. Large universities increasingly orient procurement processes around enterprise solutions that promise scalability, compliance, and vendor accountability. These processes often favour platforms backed by multinational corporations - systems like Microsoft 365, Canvas, or Google Workspace - over smaller, modular, or open alternatives. As Weller (2020) argues, decision-making tends to prioritise stability and perceived robustness, even at the expense of pedagogical flexibility and institutional autonomy. Procurement criteria, shaped by risk management frameworks, rarely account for values like transparency, data sovereignty, or user agency.

Digital literacy among decision-makers also remains a critical barrier. Strategic choices around infrastructure are often made by committees dominated by managerial or technical staff rather than educators or learners. As Castañeda and Selwyn (2018) note, many senior leaders approach digital systems through a lens of administration rather than pedagogy, leading to decisions that entrench surveillance and automation logics while sidelining critical reflection. The result is a form of “techno-solutionism” (Morozov, 2013), where platforms are positioned as inevitable, and critique is reframed as resistance to progress.

Concerns around support, scale, and sustainability further constrain the adoption of alternatives. Federated platforms and open-source tools are frequently perceived as resource-intensive, requiring specialised skills or posing unknown support burdens. While these concerns are not unfounded, they often reflect imagined risks more than empirically grounded realities. As Zhang et al. (2022) show in their comprehensive review of civic technology, many community-maintained infrastructures are not only technically robust and secure but also supported by resilient ecosystems of practice. Where institutions engage in intentional partnerships and capacity-building, these alternatives can match or even exceed the reliability of proprietary systems.

Underpinning these dynamics is a deeper logic of path dependency. Once a university adopts a particular vendor ecosystem - Microsoft, for instance - subsequent tools, integrations, and workflows become tightly coupled with that choice. Switching costs rise, user expectations become embedded, and institutional memory adapts around the platform’s affordances. This lock-in not only makes alternatives harder to implement but renders them increasingly unthinkable. As Edwards (2003) observes, infrastructure has a “reversibility threshold”: once passed, change is no longer seen as technically difficult - it is seen as politically impossible.

This infrastructural inertia is inseparable from broader dynamics of managerial governance and marketisation. Universities operate within regimes of audit, competition, and accountability that reward efficiency, metrics, and cost control. Digital systems become instruments of compliance and performance management, not tools for dialogue or democratic learning (Ball, 2012; Williamson, 2017). In this context, alternative infrastructures - those that demand deliberation, transparency, or co-ownership - pose a threat to the smooth operation of the managerial university. They are not just unfamiliar; they are structurally inconvenient.

If we are to meaningfully shift this terrain, the challenge is not only technical or tactical but political. It requires confronting the conditions under which infrastructural choices are made, the assumptions they encode, and the institutional forms they serve.

Labour, Governance, and the Public Good

Questions of digital infrastructure are inseparable from questions of labour, governance, and the public purpose of the university. The platforms we adopt do not just mediate educational content - they determine the conditions under which teaching and learning occur, shape the autonomy of staff and students, and reconfigure the university’s relationship to the wider public. As such, platform decisions are not merely technical or financial - they are profoundly political.

Infrastructure and academic labour

Contemporary educational platforms increasingly influence the nature of academic work. Learning Management Systems (LMS), data dashboards, automated marking tools, and institutional surveillance technologies all contribute to a shifting labour regime in which teaching is parsed into discrete, trackable tasks. Educators are not just users of these systems; they are subject to them. Tasks that once required academic judgement - such as assessment feedback, attendance monitoring, or learning engagement - are restructured around metrics, forms, and platform defaults. This automation of pedagogical judgement exemplifies what Ball (2012) calls the “performativity” of contemporary education: where educators are held accountable not for their practice per se, but for their alignment with measurable indicators of performance.

Furthermore, decisions about platforms rarely involve those who will be most affected by them. Procurement decisions are typically made by senior management, IT services, and procurement teams - often in response to commercial offers and institutional benchmarks rather than pedagogical insight. As Watters (2021) argues, this creates a model of governance in which educators are expected to “work within systems they had no part in choosing,” resulting in a chronic disconnect between policy and practice.

Ownership and the tools of education

The platformisation of education also raises questions about ownership. When core teaching, assessment, and communication processes are outsourced to private vendors, institutions relinquish control over critical components of the educational experience. Commercial actors - Microsoft, Google, Instructure, Turnitin - own not only the platforms but the data, metadata, and often the workflow logic of institutional education. This has consequences for intellectual property, privacy, and pedagogical freedom.

As Williamson (2017) has shown, platform companies do not merely serve educational needs - they shape them. Their business models are built on data extraction, standardisation, and algorithmic optimisation. These values increasingly filter into educational institutions, displacing traditional commitments to collegial governance, disciplinary diversity, and public mission. Platforms, in this sense, are not just tools - they are agents of institutional transformation.

From market logic to the public good

The risk, then, is that the digital university becomes an extension of market logic rather than a site of public good. As Hall (2016) notes, the increasing entanglement of higher education with commercial technology providers has led to a reorientation of universities toward operational efficiency, reputational management, and compliance - often at the expense of critical pedagogy, democratic governance, and civic responsibility.

To reclaim digital infrastructure as a public issue, we must resist the framing of platforms as neutral or inevitable. Instead, we must ask: Whose interests do these systems serve? Who decides what they do? And how might they be otherwise? The answers to these questions lie not only in technological alternatives, but in renewed attention to governance, transparency, and collective agency. Infrastructure, in this sense, is not just a backend concern - it is the front line of educational politics.

Towards a Community-Owned Digital University

Reimagining digital infrastructure in higher education necessitates a shift from top-down, vendor-driven models to participatory, values-aligned, and community-governed alternatives. This transformation is not merely technical but deeply political, involving questions of ownership, agency, and the public mission of the university.

Participatory Design: Centering Stakeholder Voices

Participatory design (PD) emphasizes involving end-users - students, faculty, and staff - in the co-creation of educational technologies and curricula. Rather than designing tools in isolation from those who will use them, PD foregrounds cultural relevance, equity, and responsiveness to diverse learning contexts. Coenraad et al. (2022) demonstrate how participatory approaches can meaningfully integrate stakeholder voices, particularly in computing education, resulting in tools and practices that are more inclusive and pedagogically grounded.

Shared Governance: Collaborative Decision-Making

Shared governance structures distribute decision-making authority among various stakeholders within the university. This collaborative approach ensures that decisions about digital infrastructure reflect a balance of perspectives and expertise. The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) underscores the importance of shared governance in fostering institutional resilience and adaptability (AGB, 2023).

Inter-Institutional Collaboration: Building Open Infrastructure

Collaborative efforts among institutions can lead to the development of open, interoperable digital infrastructures. Such partnerships can pool resources, share best practices, and create scalable solutions that serve the broader academic community. As Oliveira and Proença (2025) demonstrate in their review of sustainable campus operations, institutional collaboration is key to building systems that align with shared values and long-term public benefit. These insights are highly transferable to digital infrastructure design, where sustainability, equity, and transparency require collective vision and shared investment.

Values-Aligned Procurement and Digital Sovereignty

Procurement processes should prioritize alignment with institutional values such as transparency, equity, and sustainability. The OECD (2023) emphasizes that strategic procurement can shape digital education ecosystems by selecting tools that support these values. Additionally, digital sovereignty - the capacity of institutions to control their digital assets and data - is crucial. The European University Association (EUA) advocates for safeguarding academic and digital sovereignty to ensure that universities maintain autonomy over their digital environments (EUA, 2021).

Inspirations from Radical Library Science, Open Education, and Digital Cooperatives

Radical library science challenges traditional power structures by promoting open access and community engagement. Initiatives like the Radical Librarianship Institute aim to train librarians as agents of inclusion and change (Mellon Foundation, 2023). The open education movement advocates for freely accessible educational resources, fostering a culture of sharing and collaboration (UNESCO, 2024). Digital cooperatives, such as those supported by the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy, offer models for collectively owned and governed digital platforms that prioritize user needs over profit (Platform Cooperativism Consortium, 2023).

Closing Reflection: Infrastructure as Pedagogical Practice

Digital infrastructure is never merely technical. It is the substrate of pedagogical possibility, shaping how knowledge is created, shared, and experienced. As educational institutions increasingly rely on digital platforms to manage teaching and learning, the infrastructures they adopt silently but powerfully encode assumptions about what education is - and what it is for.

To foreground infrastructure as a pedagogical concern is to recognise that decisions about learning management systems, productivity tools, and data architectures are also decisions about epistemology, ethics, and power. They condition how teachers teach, how students learn, and how institutions govern. As Suchman (2002) argues, infrastructures “disappear into the background” until they break or are contested, but they always mediate practice. Education technologists, academics, and students must therefore learn to see and critique infrastructure not as inert scaffolding, but as a terrain of ideological struggle.

Engaging in this struggle requires a move beyond critique toward what Mattern (2015) calls infrastructural imagination: the capacity to envision and build alternatives rooted in values such as care, solidarity, openness, and justice. In this light, infrastructural decisions become opportunities for resistance - against platform lock-in, extractive data regimes, and the enclosure of educational commons - and for the reassertion of education as a public good.

This reorientation calls for new kinds of alliances. Educators must collaborate not only with one another, but with technologists, librarians, students, and activists, forging coalitions capable of co-designing ethical, community-owned systems. Institutions must create governance structures and procurement practices that support such efforts. As Sadowski (2020) illustrates through his analysis of digital platforms, infrastructures are not neutral tools but sites of economic and political power - mechanisms through which ownership, participation, and control are negotiated, often in favour of private rentier interests. Reclaiming the digital university therefore requires confronting these structural dynamics head-on and developing infrastructures aligned with public values and collective agency.

Ultimately, reclaiming infrastructure as pedagogical practice is not a utopian gesture. It is a necessary response to a landscape where default systems are often misaligned with the values of education. In a moment when higher education faces intensifying pressures of marketisation, surveillance, and automation, attending to the politics of infrastructure offers a pathway to agency. It reminds us that digital education is not something we use - it is something we make together.

Bibliography