The complicity of digital technologies in the marketisation of UK higher education: exploring the implications of a critical discourse analysis of thirteen national digital teaching and learning strategies

Abstract

Abstract National strategies play a crucial role in framing how digital technologies are enacted in Higher Education (HE). This paper draws on some of the findings of a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of thirteen digital teaching and learning strategies issued by government departments and non-departmental public bodies in the UK between 2003 and 2013. It demonstrates that, across the strategies, digital technologies are depicted as tools for advancing the marketisation of UK HE. Rather ironically, the strategies are also fraught with contradictions and paradoxes with respect to the claimed relationships between digital technologies, learning, and markets. I argue that this problematic portrayal of digital technologies makes them complicit in the neoliberal erosion of UK HE.

Keywords

• Digital technologies
• Higher education policy and strategy
• Marketisation of HE
• Neoliberalism
• Critical discourse analysis