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The pressure towards digital education is felt everywhere including in places with extreme digital divides. Resource-constrained educational environments are particularly threatened by datification manifest in the dominant business models of surveillance capitalism as there is less room in such contexts to refuse the 'free' offerings from big tech companies; it is these very contexts which are most vulnerable. Yet educators within such environments are not mere pawns of circumstance. While the realities of their structural constraints may be invisible or obfuscated, educators are driven by their own 'concerns', which in this case pertain to the needs of diverse students in very challenging circumstances as well as to their personal aversion to being monitored. This paper reports on findings from focus groups in a mixture of institutionsin South African education. Archer's theoretical framework provides a lens to show how, despite very little choice, educators critically reflect on their circumstances expressing discomfort and unease.

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to illuminate and assess the experiences and feelings of the staff of a center for teaching and learning at one South African university during the early months (April--June 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns when it switched from face-to-face teaching to emergency remote teaching (ERT). It explores the practical, operational, ethical, cultural, and emotional questions that the staff of this center dealt with as they supported the university in ERT provision. Method: This paper draws on in-depth interviews with 23 staff members of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) who revealed not only the logistical, technical, and administrative challenges faced during the ERT rollout period but the efforts they made to ensure that their efforts promoted equity (for students), agility (for the university), and psychological sustainability (for themselves). Findings: Using cultural historical activity theory as a lens to assess CILT staff activities, findings indicate that a number of contradictions and tensions emerged during this period--concerning exacerbated inequities, pedagogical compromises, cultural anxieties, and psychological pressures--that could not be fully resolved but only managed. Implications for Research: CILT staff are interested not only in providing logistical, technical, and practical support to a university but also in dealing effectively with the ethical, cultural, and emotional concerns that arise in times of crisis and transition, such as the current one. Understanding what happened during COVID-19 may offer insights into how other centers for teaching and learning can adjust to what will likely remain an unstable future in higher education. Conclusion: The pandemic ruptured the previously organic change and growth that characterized CILT development, transforming it as the staff responded to this South African university's need to provide support to academics and students engaging with ERT.

This paper explores how academics navigate the Higher Education (HE) landscape being reshaped by the convergence of unbundling, marketisation and digitisation processes. Social Realism distinguishes three layers of social reality (in this case higher education): the empirical, the actual and the real. The empirical layer is presented by the academics and their teaching; the actual are the institutional processes of teaching, learning, assessment, mode of provision (online, blended); the real are the power and regulatory mechanisms that shape the first two and affect academics' agency. Two dimensions of academics' experiences and perceptions are presented. The structural dimension reflects academics' perceptions of the emergent organisation of the education environment including the changing narratives around digitisation, marketisation and unbundling in the context of digital inequalities. The professional dimension aspects play out at the actor level with respect to work-related issues, particularly their own. This dimension is portrayed in academics' concerns about ownership and control.

A number of universities in South Africa are sharing teaching materials online making them freely available as Open Educational Resources (OER). The open sharing of teaching materials has been coupled with a number of institutional policy initiatives. This paper seeks to explore the institutional policy landscape of OER in South Africa in order to first understand the discourses and assumptions that underpin OER policies and second, to critique and problematize the major discourses and assumptions that underpin OER policies. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used as a tool for identifying dominant discourses in OER. Findings show that OER policies in public universities in South Africa are underpinned by three dominant discourses on access, collaboration and transformation. The extent to which OER can democratise access to education and redress socio-historic inequalities in the provision of educational resources is not guaranteed. Some scholars argue that OER could in some contexts perpetuate inequalities if the same barriers of accessing education in a traditional classroom have not been dealt with. OER policies are written as optimistic accounts on how to publish OER but they do not do a good job in encouraging reuse.

There are concerns about mental health in academia globally, which is a direct consequence of an increase of a neoliberal entrepreneurial approach, one heightened during the time of the pandemic. This paper uses Skotnicki and Nielsen’s categories of alienation and Fisher’s work on capitalist realism to make sense of academic staff’s responses to a survey on their experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching, collected in 2021 at a large research-intensive university in South Africa. The responses indicate that participants all experienced some form of alienation, though experienced and expressed differently. We suggest expanding Skotnicki and Nielsen’s lens on agency and structure with what we found missing, an element of culture, to ask the question: “How can a university create and rebuild a sense of community and belonging to counter alienation?”. We propose a concerted effort to build spaces for collective encounters to rediscover community, which may allow us to re-imagine a future for the academy beyond conflicting imperatives of responding to the need for socio-economic redress and delivering education as a public good, in times of austerity budgets.36

Why is Openness in Education important, and why is it critically needed at this moment? As manifested in our guiding question, the significance of Openness in Education and its immediate necessity form the heart of this collaborative editorial piece. This rather straightforward, yet nuanced query has sparked this collective endeavour by using individual testimonies, which may also be taken as living narratives, to reveal the value of Openness in Education as a praxis. Such testimonies serve as rich, personal narratives, critical introspections, and experience-based accounts that function as sources of data. The data gleaned from these narratives points to the understanding of Openness in Education as a complex, multilayered concept intricately woven into an array of values. These range from aspects such as sharing, access, flexibility, affordability, enlightenment, barrier-removal, empowerment, care, individual agency, trust, innovation, sustainability, collaboration, co-creation, social justice, equity, transparency, inclusivity, decolonization, democratisation, participation, liberty, and respect for diversity. This editorial, as a product of collective endeavour, invites its readers to independently engage with individual narratives, fostering the creation of unique interpretations. This call stems from the distinctive character of each narrative as they voice individual researchers’ perspectives from around the globe, articulating their insights within their unique situational contexts.

This paper describes and critiques how surveillance is situated and evolving in higher education settings, with a focus on the surveillance of teaching and learning. It argues that intensifying practices of datafication and monitoring in universities echo those in broader society, and that the Covid-19 global pandemic has both exacerbated these practices and made them more visible. Surveillance brings risks to learning relationships, academic and work practices, as well as reinforcing economic models of extraction and inequalities in education and society. Responses to surveillance practices include resistance, advocacy, education, regulation and investment, and a number of these responses are examined here. Drawing on scholarship and practice, the paper provides an in-depth overview of this topic for people in university settings including those in leadership positions, learning technology roles, educators and students. The authors are part of an international network of researchers, educators and university leaders who are working together to develop new approaches to surveillance futures for higher education: https://aftersurveillance.net/. Authors are based in Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, and this paper reflects those specific contexts.

The advent of massive open online courses and online degrees offered via digital platforms has occurred in a climate of austerity. Public universities worldwide face challenges to expand their educational reach, while competing in international rankings, raising fees and generating third-stream income. Online forms of unbundled provision offering smaller flexible low-cost curricular units have promised to disrupt this system. Yet do these forms challenge existing hierarchies in higher education and the market logic that puts pressure on universities and public institutions at large in the neoliberal era? Based on fieldwork in South Africa, this article explores the perceptions of senior managers of public universities and of online programme management companies. Analysing their considerations around unbundled provision, we discuss two conflicting logics of higher education that actors in structurally different positions and in historically divergent institutions use to justify their involvement in public-private partnerships: the logic of capital and the logic of social relevance.

The pressure towards digital education is felt everywhere including in places with extreme digital divides. Resource-constrained educational environments are particularly threatened by datification manifest in the dominant business models of surveillance capitalism as there is less room in such contexts to refuse the 'free' offerings from big tech companies; it is these very contexts which are most vulnerable. Yet educators within such environments are not mere pawns of circumstance. While the realities of their structural constraints may be invisible or obfuscated, educators are driven by their own 'concerns', which in this case pertain to the needs of diverse students in very challenging circumstances as well as to their personal aversion to being monitored. This paper reports on findings from focus groups in a mixture of institutionsin South African education. Archer's theoretical framework provides a lens to show how, despite very little choice, educators critically reflect on their circumstances expressing discomfort and unease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues of inequality in higher education have received considerable attention in recent decades, but the intersection of inequality and educational technology at an institutional level has received little attention. This study aims to provide a perspective on institutional educational technology policy informed by current understandings of inequality. The study takes the form of a content analysis of institutional educational technology policy and strategy documents of universities in the United Kingdom and South Africa. A preliminary review of the educational technology policy literature reveals low levels of engagement with issues of inequality in policy documents at an institutional level. Therborn's typology of inequality provides the basis of a structured framework for the analysis, with Bourdieu's concepts of capital being incorporated as markers of the various types of inequality. The study reveals regional differences in the approach to inequality as a policy matter, as well as a varied engagement with the issues of inequality related to educational technology at a policy level.

Abstract During the period 2015–2017, student protests and university shutdowns rocked the higher education sector in South Africa, with key issues being raised regarding student exclusion based on financial, epistemological and cultural grounds. In this highly politicised and contested environment, some universities decided to use blended and online delivery as a strategy to enable the academic year to be completed and all curriculum to be covered, despite the disruptions. This was a controversial decision politically and a challenging one practically. From the perspective of the academics at the University of Cape Town (UCT), this paper draws on interviews with educators in three broad disciplinary areas to explore their views, practices, and experiences regarding the use of online materials in these unique circumstances. Activity Theory provides a framework to consider the issues systemically and to identify the tensions and contradictions in the system.

MOOCs have been seen as holding promise for advancing Open Education. While the pedagogical design of the first MOOCs grew out of the Open Education Movement, the current trend has MOOCs exhibiting fewer of the original openness goals than anticipated. The aim of this study is to examine the practices and attitudes of MOOC educators at an African university and ask whether and how their practices and attitudes become open after creating and teaching a MOOC. Activity Theory is used to contextually locate the educators' motivations and to analyse their practices in terms of striving towards an object. With this lens we describe how educators' openness-related practices and attitudes change over time in two different MOOCs. Two sets of conceptions of open practices are used to detect instances of change, providing four dimensions of changed open educational practices. Semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and artefacts provide data for this rare study, which considers these issues from the perspective of the Global South. Through studying the educators' practices in relation to openness, it becomes evident how open practices are emergent and responsive.

Using Schatzki's practices framework as a lens, this paper reports on the practices of university students accessing learning resources at a research-intensive university in South Africa. Using a mixed-methods approach, 1001 survey responses and 6 focus groups were analysed to explore how students in three professional disciplines access learning resources, with the focus on digitally mediated piracy practices. The findings suggest a blurring between the legal and the illegal and indicate the normalcy of piracy practices, with nuanced distinctions and understandings manifest.

Collaboration or competition? This question is at the centre of this editorial, which explores the importance of sector-wide approaches to research into educational technology. This has become particularly relevant in recent years in response to a range of significant challenges or disruptions the tertiary education sector has had to face, for example, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic or the emergence of new generative AI tools. To address these challenges, we have taken a collaborative approach to writing this editorial, with contributing authors from across the world responding to four key questions. The responses to those questions were then arranged into four key themes: collaboration in response to disruption, individual benefits from collaboration, communal benefits from collaboration, and ensuring collaborative wisdom. The editorial concludes with a section that situates the preceding discussion in a broader context and challenges us to consider our wider impact on the world as a sector and, in particular, as related to educational technology. We conclude that collaboration is a must and has the potential to empower us to push the boundaries of what is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a new form of educational provision occupying a space between formal online courses and informal learning. Adopting measures used with formal online courses to assess the outcomes of MOOCs is often not informative because the context is very different. The particular affordances of MOOCs shaping learning environments comprise scale (in terms of numbers of students) and diversity (in terms of the types of students). As learning designers, we focus on understanding the particular tools and pedagogical affordances of the MOOC platform to support learner engagement. Drawing on research into learner engagement conducted in the broader field of online learning, we consider how learner engagement in a MOOC might be designed for by looking at three pedagogical aspects: teacher presence, social learning, and peer learning.

This paper draws on actor-network theory and on the sociology of cultural consumption to examine the phenomenon of corporate Massive Open Online Courses. Through an analysis of texts available in the public domain, the paper argues that over a short period (between 2012 and 2013) digitisation technology became associated with the emergence of a hybrid "actor": the digital video-recorder teacher. A parallel is drawn between the "interactive affordances" of digital instruction and the playback and cataloguing options that have contributed to shifts in television viewing habits. The digital video-recorder teacher is described as an artefact in the service of a postmodern project of self-improvement through cultural consumption, which recruits digitisation to meet a growing demand for "upgrades to the self". In the conclusion, the paper explores how the study of digital education could benefit from an interface between sociomaterial studies and the sociology of culture.

As the boundaries between technology and social media have decreased, the potential for creative production or participatory practices have increased. However, the affordances of online content creation (OCC) are still taken up by a minority of internet users despite the opportunities offered for engagement and creativity. While previous studies have addressed creative production by university students for specific purposes, there is a research gap concerning OCC in the everyday lives of African university students. This paper describes the stories of three students who are online creators of content, the social media they utilised; their trajectories; their linkages with career interests; the types of online presences they created, maintained or discontinued into their university lives. As the case studies spanned digital practices that were informal and extracurricular yet peer-supported as well as interest-driven and academically oriented, the pedagogical framework of Connected Learning proved an appropriate heuristic. The study shows that being a digital creator gives students a competitive edge in our globally competitive society.

There are concerns about mental health in academia globally, which is a direct consequence of an increase of a neoliberal entrepreneurial approach, one heightened during the time of the pandemic. This paper uses Skotnicki and Nielsen's categories of alienation and Fisher's work on capitalist realism to make sense of academic staff's responses to a survey on their experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching, collected in 2021 at a large research-intensive university in South Africa. The responses indicate that participants all experienced some form of alienation, though experienced and expressed differently. We suggest expanding Skotnicki and Nielsen's lens on agency and structure with what we found missing, an element of culture, to ask the question: "How can a university create and rebuild a sense of community and belonging to counter alienation?". We propose a concerted effort to build spaces for collective encounters to rediscover community, which may allow us to re-imagine a future for the academy beyond conflicting imperatives of responding to the need for socio-economic redress and delivering education as a public good, in times of austerity budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]