The hidden architecture of higher education: building a big data infrastructure for the ‘smarter university’

Universities are increasingly organized and managed through digital data. The collection, processing and dissemination of Higher Education data is enabled by complex new data infrastructures that include both human and nonhuman actors, all framed by political, economic and social contingencies. HE data infrastructures need to be seen not just as technical programs but as practical relays of political objectives to reform the sector. This article focuses on a major active data infrastructure project in Higher Education in the United Kingdom. It examines the sociotechnical networks of organizations, software programs, standards, dashboards and visual analytics technologies that constitute the infrastructure, and how these technologies are fused to governmental imperatives of market reform. The analysis foregrounds how HE is being reimagined through the utopian ideal of the ‘smarter university’ while simultaneously being reformed through the political project of marketization.

[1]  Jeremy Knox,et al.  Data Power in Education: Exploring Critical Awareness with the “Learning Analytics Report Card” , 2017 .

[2]  Paul Prinsloo,et al.  Fleeing from Frankenstein’s monster and meeting Kafka on the way: Algorithmic decision-making in higher education , 2017 .

[3]  Industrial Strategy.  Industrial strategy: building a Britain fit for the future , 2017 .

[4]  Ben Williamson,et al.  The social life of Learning Analytics: cluster analysis and the ‘performance’ of algorithmic education , 2018 .

[5]  Linda Corrin,et al.  Student retention and learning analytics: A snapshot of Australian practices and a framework for advancement , 2015 .

[6]  B. Larkin.  The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure , 2013 .

[7]  Pierre Dillenbourg,et al.  The Evolution of Research on Digital Education , 2016, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education.

[8]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Divining a Digital Future - Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing , 2011 .

[9]  P. N. Edwards,et al.  Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and Research Challenges , 2013 .

[10]  Amanda Janice Roberson,et al.  A Blueprint for Better Information: Recommendations for a Federal Postsecondary Student-Level Data Network. , 2017 .

[11]  K. Easterling.  Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space , 2014 .

[12]  Sarita Albagli,et al.  Memory Practices in the Sciences , 2005 .

[13]  A. Young.  Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. , 2001 .

[14]  Christopher G. Brown,et al.  THE APPLICATION OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TO HIGHER EDUCATION: TECHNICAL AND MANAGERIAL PERSPECTIVES , 2012 .

[15]  Roger Burrows,et al.  Living with the H-Index? Metric Assemblages in the Contemporary Academy , 2012 .

[16]  S. A. Becker,et al.  NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition , 2015 .

[17]  D. Bigo,et al.  Data politics , 2017, Big Data Soc..

[18]  S. Robertson,et al.  The dynamics of ‘market-making’ in higher education , 2016 .

[19]  Rob Kitchin,et al.  Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and Their Work , 2014 .

[20]  Neil Selwyn,et al.  Digital Technology and the Contemporary University: Degrees of digitization , 2014 .

[21]  Lawrence Busch,et al.  Standards: Recipes for Reality , 2011 .

[22]  Herdiyanti Herdiyanti.  Role of Career Women in Families: (Study of the Existence of Career Women in Families in Balunijuk Village) , 2018, Society.

[23]  B. Latour.  Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands , 1986 .

[24]  Barbara Martini,et al.  The Data Revolution. Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences , 2016 .

[25]  B. Latour.  Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory , 2005 .

[26]  Terrie Lynn Thompson,et al.  Learning analytics: challenges and limitations , 2017 .

[27]  W. Davies.  Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism , 2017 .

[28]  Gillian Rose,et al.  Networks, Interfaces, and Computer-Generated Images: Learning from Digital Visualisations of Urban Redevelopment Projects , 2014 .

[29]  Christine L. Borgman,et al.  Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World , 2014 .

[30]  Christian Sandvig,et al.  Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook , 2018, New Media Soc..