ABSTRACT
Data capitalism builds on the expansion of markets through the datafication of evermore social domains via social media, search engines and interconnected online communication technologies. Education is one such domain in which datafication has entered, and with the COVID-19 pandemic, the introduction of large-scale online teaching has become a necessity, which has further speeded up the transfer from campus-based to online education.
With the move of teachers and students from on-site to on-line mode, universities are now increasingly acting like platform companies. Classrooms, lecture halls, offices and meeting rooms are abandoned, and the sites of learning are now delegated to the private sphere of the home of lecturers and students. First, this means transferring the responsibilities for creating a functional educational environment to teachers and students. Second, this would transform large parts of educational practices, thus affecting the very essence of knowledge production and dissemination.
This aim of the chapter is to discuss the economic and administrative dynamics behind this transformation on the basis of the different value regimes underlying data capitalism. It is argued that the drive towards the platformisation – or uberisation as one could provocatively label it – of education is partly driven by an economic, and partly by administrative rationality.
