ABSTRACT
Chapter 4—“Automating Higher Education: Taylorism and the Teaching Machines”—explores recent developments in labor-saving technologies and public concerns surrounding accelerated automation systems and then contextualizes some EdTech and the MOOCC with regard to a historical continuum of attempts by US corporations, educational reformers and cash-strapped university administrators to Taylorize and automate education by applying “new” technologies to the academic labor process. All around the world, corporations are producing and selling automation systems to other corporations in order to help them lower labor costs and increase profits. Currently, the pace of automation is fast and the social consequences of automation’s acceleration are vast. Chapter 4 examines EdTech as an agent of the automation of higher education and considers the role of the MOOCC as a new “teaching machine” that lets universities teach more students with fewer professors.
