The Political Economy of Digital Educational Content and the Transformation of Learning and Teaching in Global Higher Education

Abstract

The digital transformation of higher education, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has led to much greater use of digital learning resources, including digital texts, images, videos, interactive programmes, quizzes and so on. While the digitalisation of the publishing industry and the rise of new media businesses are well-documented, questions of who now produces digital education resources and who pays for them have been largely overlooked. This chapter examines the ways in which new business models are shaping universities’ and students’ access to educational content, distinguishing between content paid for by students, content paid for by universities and open access content whose production is sponsored by a wide range of organisations with diverse motivations. Traditional academic publishers, slow to respond to the shift to digital learning platforms, now find themselves in fierce competition with edutech firms, media companies, individual online content producers, governments and non-government organisations. The chapter concludes by observing that the proliferation of digital educational content requires academics to more often and more actively select appropriate content from a rapidly growing smorgasbord of options provided across multiple platforms, by thousands of producers, of variable quality.