Conference Agenda

Digital education platforms are in tremendous upsurge, where COVID-19 acted as a catalyst, and have increasingly found their way into the core of various education institutions. Critical education scholarship has extensively studied these developments and the intricate ways in which these platforms (re-)shape what it means to (be) educate(d) (Williamson, 2017) and how education itself is changing form (Decuypere et al., 2021). Recently, growing concerns have been expressed regarding the differential implications for teacher professionalism in an increasingly ‘platformised’ school environment, where digital education platforms are not only increasingly grounded as new forms of educational experts, but where the central role and expertise of teachers itself is equally destabilising and losing its self-evidence (Hartong & Decuypere, 2023). Put differently, what it means to be a teacher in a school, is increasingly becoming entangled with the presence of digital education platforms, shaping the pedagogical autonomy and labour of teachers, and the (potentially) perpetual need for professionalisation this implies (cf. Lewis & Decuypere, 2023; Selwyn et al., 2017).

Given these developments, it is crucial to articulate empirical accounts of the complexities of how teachers’ professionality is being reshaped, and how the teacher and teaching itself are being negotiated through platform logics, as well as the type of educational participation these platforms envision (Perrotta et al., 2021). Such accounts of platformised teacher professionalities are still largely absent in the literature (but see e.g. Landri, 2021), most significantly of all in relation to cases of non-proprietary and free and open-source (FOSS) platforms. That is to say, contemporary critical scholarship has predominantly based its critiques on the study of proprietary platforms such as Google Classroom or ClassDojo (e.g. Manolev et al., 2019), thereby largely sidestepping prominent ‘open’ alternatives such as Moodle. However, Moodle is increasingly being implemented across Europe in schools and other educational institutions as a central learning management system and learning platform to counter the contemporary dominance of proprietary actors exerting large amounts of power on education (Moodle, 2021; also Kuran et al., 2017). Fostering the four freedoms of FOSS (using, studying, altering, and improving the code ‘freely’), Moodle principally envisions teachers, firstly, as being technically capable of redesigning the open infrastructure of its platform and, secondly, as willing to open up their teaching practice by collaborating with other teachers internationally (https//moodle.com/about/open-source/). At present, we lack understanding of how this enforces different responsibilities and foci within teachers’ professionality.

To address this gap, this paper closely engages with the embedded Moodle infrastructure of one school, so as to understand how teacher professionalities (i.e. what it means to teach and be a teacher, and what is required to sustain this) are shaped through the platform. The objective of this study is primarily to analyse the educational consequences of such platforms regarding teacher professionality beyond often-mentioned privately induced logics. That is, this study focuses on the changing nature of pedagogy, responsibility, autonomy, and care, in the teacher’s professionality. By focusing on a platform that in essence still has to be designed by local schools because of Moodle’s open and customisable nature, we aim to go beyond a critical attitude that considers digital platformisation as a general external development affecting education in largely problematic ways. Rather, we approach Moodle as a case through which we can conceptualise the context-specificity of school platformisation: not as a process where schools and teachers are passively affected by an external development, but as an educational process itself to which actors actively relate. This contribution consequently analyses the configuration of teacher professionalities up close through one localised school platform, and the way teachers ‘inhabit’ and enact this platformised environment (cf. Perrotta, 2023).

This paper offers an empirical analysis of learning management systems (LMS) applying predictive analytics for risk detection in K-12 school education. Conceptually, we explore the promise of predictive analytics to function across various societal domains (e.g. education, predictive policing, digital public service provision) and how LMS configure good educational futures through risk management and mitigation. The starting point for our analysis is the observation that many design features of LMS are risk-related and future-oriented, promising educators and students to achieve success in form of good grades and high graduation rates. Appealing at first sight, this promise of successful educational futures promotes narratives of precision and efficiency inscribed in LMS design (Macgilchrist et al., 2023). Overall, design of educational technologies has been increasingly studied by sociologists of education and critical software and critical data scholars (Decuypere, 2019; Jarke & Macgilchrist, 2021; Selwyn, 2022). So far, this research focuses on the ideologies and imaginaries of technology providers inscribed in the design of educational systems (Macgilchrist, 2019; Manolev et al., 2019; Rahm, 2021; Williamson, 2017). While there are prominent discussions about the role of big tech in shaping the educational domain and the business origin of analytics in education (Davies et al., 2022; Prinsloo, 2019), the centrality of risk and failure in the design of educational technologies has yet to be addressed specifically. Attending empirically to risk prediction in LMS this paper extends on such literature, questioning what and who can be defined as ‘risk’ threatening good educational futures and in which ways.

Narratives about risk and failure, however, are not unique to educational technologies, but are widely discussed in research on predictive policing (Lum & Isaac, 2016; Egbert & Leese, 2021) and digital public service provision (Allhutter et al., 2020; Büchner & Dosdall, 2021). To understand what various ways to define ‘risk’ mean for educational futures, we draw on the concept of “spheres transgression” (Sharon, 2021) to learn about the implications of ‘risk’ inscribed in technologies in other societal domains. Sphere transgression can be understood as an advantageous encroachment of one societal domain into another, making use of distributive capacities of one domain (e.g. big tech) to advance commercially, politically, and socially in the other domains (e.g. education). We argue here that analysing LMS design features we can reconstruct how educational technologies (aim to) reconfigure the organisation of teaching and learning, course design, and interaction between teachers, learners, and administrators by mitigating risks and managing failure.

The (presumable) ability of LMS to produce big quantities of data and to quantify previously unmeasurable societal processes promise educational actors to achieve greater efficiency and more control over the everyday organisation of schooling by managing various educational risks: risk of student drop-out, students failing the course, or graduating from school altogether. To explain how such technological promises are related to actual futures, scholars of technology have connected mundane acts of design, advertising, and negotiation to future-making (Watts, 2015). In these mundane acts, the core characteristics of future-making - anticipation, aspiration, and imagination (Appadurai, 2013) – materialize in form of software design and specific features. To understand and un-make the connection between LMS features of risk prediction and educational futures this paper proposes studying what forms these anticipations, aspirations, and imaginations take in LMS design.

Overall, this paper makes a conceptual and an empirical contribution based on LMS design. Conceptually, following scholars of technology studies concerned with future-making, we shift the analytical focus to the examination of software design from past to the future. Empirically, we analyse risk-related LMS design features. Specifically, we ask how risk is defined in the design of LMS using predictive analytics.

How did International Large-Scale Assessment (ILSA) contracting emerge and develop? And what is the legacy of this history?

In studying the history of education data, research has focused on assessment practices (i.e. Hutt and Schneider 2018) and governance uses (Ozga 2009; Merry 2011; Moss 2014). Until recently, scholarship was less concerned with the making of data despite Science and Technology Studies underlining that science (this includes data) is politics by other means (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Latour 1987, 1999), thus begging for scholoarly investigation. This paper contributes to literature on the history of data, by rendering visible the history and legacy of a group of actors who have so far remained invisible. Although ILSAs are administered by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), they are mostly developed, implemented and analysed by ILSA contractors. Until today, contractors’ involvement has not been studied. This paper studies the emergence of ILSA contracting by looking into the first ILSAs at the IEA, which came under pressure to keep up with assessment developments in the USA in the 1980s. The paper then focuses on the development of new assessment approaches in the USA that were picked up in adult literacy assessments at the OECD. Finally, the paper analyses the development of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) contracting. To show how the legacy of this history still shapes current ILSAs, the paper analyses how PISA contracting evolved. This history shows how individuals and organizations, which had previously been collaborating in academic projects at the IEA, won the first ILSA contracts by virtue of accumulated capitals and interpersonal trust that put them at an advantage over potential ILSA contractors. What comes to the surface are government interests, emotional bonds, and personal struggles.

To analyse how ILSA contracting emerged and evolved (between 1960 and 2020), I draw on Bourdieu’s (1993) concept of field - described as a dynamic social space of struggles with its own laws of functioning and unequally distributed power - to understand how contactors relate to one another; and actors’ habitus. The paper also draws on business network approach, which recognizes the importance of networks and the position of actors and changes of position within networks (Ford and Håkansson 2013). Finally, the paper draws on Huang and Wilkinson (2013) to analyse the dynamics and evolution of trust in ILSA contracting. Huang and Wilkinson describe both cognitive and affective trust as key to understanding business relationships and behaviour. Cognitive trust can be described as the ‘evaluation of the competence, responsibility and dependability’ (2013: 456) of actors, while affective trust is described as emotional bonds and ‘the belief that an exchange partner cares about your welfare, will act positively towards it and take care to avoid harming it’ (2013: 456). Trust can be interpersonal and interorganizational (Zaheer et al. 1998).