The Servitization of Australian K-12 Educational Settings

Abstract

Servitization is a notion borrowed from the manufacturing sector, where a tangible product is replaced or supplemented by an intangible service. Servitization is a global phenomenon and found across multiple sectors and settings including finance, transport, and accommodation. In educational settings, servitization sees commercial apps and platforms supplementing or replacing physical textbooks and other aspects of educational practice. With similarities to the rapid ascension seen with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in higher education, many digital products in K-12 settings are currently 'morphing' into service-based platforms, some of which require ongoing subscription fees. Often making claims of democratizing education, the analysis of servitization in K-12 settings is approached from a postdigital perspective to 'hold to account' any such claims. This paper explores servitization in Australian K-12 settings and any potential impacts on educational practice concerning deliberative democracy. It draws on data from 16 semi-structured interviews from the Apps in Australian Classrooms Project and uses the historical progression of MOOCs as an example of servitization in an educational setting to explore any impacts related to servitization that may be evident in Australian K-12 educational settings.

Personalization in Australian K-12 classrooms: how might digital teaching and learning tools produce intangible consequences for teachers’ workplace conditions?

“…Further, the sales and marketing strategies use teachers as conduits for educational technology advertising within the relatively unregulated 'ad-tech market' (Andrejevic et al, 2021). It is the data associated with concepts described as Servitization (Arantes, 2020), Assetization (Komljenovic, 2020) and Platformization (Kumar et al, 2019). By considering this data as valued and important, the notion of data shifts from the perspective of student learning (Siemens, 2013) and local data (Selwyn, 2020) and towards teacher labour, agency and privacy (Selwyn, 2019b;Williamson, 2017).…”

“…For example, a new educational technology platform may enact a business strategy that offers 'freemium' apps. The app is provided for free or via subscription to secure market share (Arantes, 2020). Suppose an educational technology platform assesses that a potential teacher or school is likely to encounter problems paying for their product.…”

“…The use of commercial apps and platforms in K-12 educational settings across Australia has dramatically grown in recent years. Many schools across Australia are now either 'Google schools' or 'Microsoft Schools' (Perrotta et al, 2021), which are in addition to multitudes of other commercial apps and platforms used as digital teaching tools (Arantes, 2020;Rennie et al, 2019). This network of people, companies, applications and devices in the classroom (Kumar et al, 2019) is supported by a dominant educational discourse that largely places technology as an innovation (Gonski et al, 2018).…”

“…Algorithmic bias is described here as "predictions or outputs from an AI system, where those predictions or outputs exhibit erroneous or unjustified differential treatment between two groups" (Lattimore et al, 2020, p. 21). With personalisation, a form of business intelligence in educational settings, this paper also considers personalisation in terms of commercialisation (Arantes, 2020). This conceptual paper argues for increased discourse about technologies that use or provide predictive analytics by considering potential strategies to address consequences associated with algorithmic bias.…”

Higher Education’s Microcredentialing Craze: a Postdigital-Deweyan Critique

“…When higher education institutions partner with third-party vendors to provide microcredentials, they effectively convert goods into services. Borrowed from the manufacturing sector, servitization is when a 'tangible product is replaced or supplemented by an intangible service' (Arantes 2020). The intentional entanglement of product and service, as well as the ensuing confusion over which is on offer, contributes to a scheme of increased revenue generation (Tauqeer and Bang 2018).…”