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Background: The background presents a comprehensive examination of how dental professionals in the UK integrate social networks into their daily practice. They rely on online resources for just-in-time learning, acquiring essential knowledge and skills when needed. The General Dental Council (GDC) oversees dental professionals, setting standards for practice and protecting patients' interests. The GDC's regulatory framework has historically undervalued informal learning, partly due to limited evidence of its effectiveness and the challenges in evaluating its outcomes. Nevertheless, dental professionals actively engage in self-directed learning, with social media playing a valuable role in their professional development. The complex nature of social media demands further research, necessitating the development of a comprehensive conceptual framework to explore the interconnected aspects of networks and informal learning and its complexities. Objectives: The primary aim of this research is to acquire comprehensive insights into the utilisation of Hybrid Social Learning Networks among Dental Professionals in the United Kingdom, specifically concerning their professional development. The study explores how these Dental Professionals engage in learning, exchanging information, and sharing their experiences through various networks, as well as their attitudes towards the adoption of technology. Methods: An online survey employing a fixed mixed methods design was utilised to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. The survey incorporated a combination of closed and open-ended questions to capture a comprehensive understanding of the research topic via the lens of complexity theory. Results: The data revealed a positive impact of personal use of social media on its professional application among dental professionals. They actively engaged with social media networks to collaborate with peers and experts, sharing knowledge and staying updated on professional developmen

Critical scholarship has already shown how automation processes may be problematic, for example, by reproducing social inequalities instead of removing them or requiring intense labour from education institutions’ staff instead of easing the workload. Despite these critiques, automated interventions in education are expanding fast and often with limited scrutiny of the technological and commercial specificities of such processes. We build on existing debates by asking: does automation of learning situations contribute to assetisation processes in EdTech, and if so, how? Drawing on document analysis and interviews with EdTech companies’ employees, we argue that automated interventions make assetisation possible. We trace their techno-commercial logic by analysing how learning situations are made tangible by constructing digital objects, and how they are automated through specific computational interventions. We identify three assetisation processes: First, the alienation of digital objects from students and staff deepens the companies’ control of digital services offering automated learning interventions. Second, engagement fetishism—i.e., treating engagement as both the goal and means of automated learning situations—valorises particular forms of automation. And finally, techno-deterministic beliefs drive investment and policy into identified forms of automation, making higher education and EdTech constituents act ‘as if’ the automation of learning is feasible.

The World Yearbook of Education 2024 contends with the digitalisation and datafication of education associated with the arrival of big data, algorithms, AI and automated digital technologies. Contemporary digitalisation and datafication in education have emerged from five intertwined trends: the production of shared imaginaries of a digital future, the emergence of educational data science as a model of knowledge production, a political turn to data-driven policy and governance, transformations in the digital data economy, and the rapid growth of the edtech industry. The chapters foreground four analytical approaches as an agenda for research on digitalisation and datafication in education. Focusing on sociotechnical foundations, research interrogates the social, scientific and historical factors involved in the development and deployment of new technologies and practices. Research on the political economy of digitalisation foregrounds the complex relations between locally enacted forms of digitalisation and global economic trends in the technology industry. The dynamics of digitalisation and datafication underpin the ways contemporary education systems can be monitored, controlled and governed, such as through digital surveillance techniques and automated data-driven decision-making. In turn, research investigates consequences like bias and discrimination, inequality and environmental impact, and explores alternative models like technical democracy and design justice approaches.

Providing a comprehensive, global overview of the digitalisation of education, the World Yearbook of Education 2024 examines the ways advanced digital technologies are transforming educational practices, institutions and policy processes. Establishing a critical research agenda for analysing the digitalisation of education, the carefully selected chapters in this collection interrogate the current impacts of new digital technologies, emerging controversies over emerging data practices and future implications of algorithmic systems, automated decision-making and AI in education. Organised into four sections, the contributions in the collection examine the following: The historical, scientific and technical foundations of contemporary digitalisation in education The political and economic dynamics that underpin the education technology industry and new platform models of education How algorithms, automation and AI support new modes of data-driven governance and control of education systems Controversies over the inequitable effects of digitalisation in education, and proposals for data justice, ethics and regulation This resource is ideal reading for researchers, students, educational practitioners and policy officials interested in understanding the future of digital technologies in education.

This study examines the socio-material interplay between the learning management system (LMS) and lecturer professional identities. Increasingly prominent in higher education institutions, LMSs were especially foregrounded during the swift transition to remote learning in the wake of the pandemic. There has been an abundance of international scholarship related to the LMS, including research into implementation strategies, adoption patterns and online teaching, yet less empirical attention has been paid to lecturers’ additional pedagogical and administrative LMS practices. Even rarer are studies which incorporate a sociomaterial sensibility to trace not only the discursive renderings of identity positioning, but to simultaneously explore how materiality is implicated in producing lecturer selves. Responding to this gap in the literature, the study harnesses a novel theoretical approach, integrating positioning theory, the metaphor of imbrication and the mangle of practice. The social constructionist ethno-case study design permits the research to zoom in on a specific platform, Blackboard, and its contextualised use in a United Arab Emirates (UAE) college. The UAE is a particularly insightful location to study lecturer professional identities given its unique, yet unstable, occupational environment for educators. Blackboard is one of the most prevalent LMSs worldwide, consequently providing a relevant, rich and informative instantiation for a socio-material analysis of an LMS in practice. Visual elicitation interviews with lecturers, interviews with specialists and managers, observations and a document review provide a nuanced account of how lecturer positioning is negotiated through the imbrications of discursive resources, material agencies and power relations resultant to the mandated use of Blackboard. As these socio-material imbrications rewrite narratives of lecturer professional identities, three key storylines are constructed from the data. The first illumin

Edtech entrepreneurs, investors and international consultants have claimed that higher education is inefficient, inaccessible and fails to deliver employable graduates. They often promote the view that universities are broken and in desperate need of digital disruption. The rise of platforms like Uber, Spotify and Airbnb in other sectors is seen as indicative of what is to come in higher education. Instead of disregarding these calls for disruption as discursive tropes, we explore how value is constructed in the imagined digital disruption of higher education. We employ the lens of assetisation to analyse three variants of imagined disruption: disruption 'in', 'of' and 'to' higher education. First, we argue that value is constructed via intra-organisational asset co-creation in order to build efficiencies and personalisated services. Second, value is constructed by delivering service for consumption via assetised public-private partnerships. Third, value is constructed by coordinating new lifelong-learning education marketplaces, which are governed via assetisation. These variants need democratic and sector-specific discussion on digital asset governance to support fair, just and democratic futures for the sector.

In opening up higher education to the market and introducing the Office for Students, the Higher Education and Research Act (2017) (HERA) has created a quality assurance system in England which diverges from the rest of the UK and Europe. This qualitative study explores the enactment of policy change and its implications for the quality assurance of teaching and learning. It uses social practice theory (SPT) as the theoretical framework. Methodologically, 20 interviews were conducted with quality assurance professionals (QPs) from 20 higher education institutions and analysed thematically. The key findings related to the changing roles of QPs and the variations in their responses to the HERA. The majority claimed to occupy a third space between administration and academia, which shaped their professional identities and contributed to membership of a strong community of practice centred around the Quality Assurance Agency’s Quality Code (2013-2017) and the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG). Two principal issues emerged as a consequence of the HERA: the authoritarian approach of the Office for Students (OfS), and the replacement of cyclical peer review and enhancement with metricised accountability. Responses ranged from the acceptance and implementation of outcomes-based internal monitoring to the operation of a dual system, designed to meet the data requirements of the OfS while maintaining existing enhancement activity. Many were however reconstructing policy, bringing internal monitoring and data management together to enhance provision by changing institutional structures, systems, staff and skills. In most cases, policy was being enacted in a constructivist way, demonstrating that change needs time, support, and differentiated approaches to the socialisation of institutional microcultures. The capacity to effect change varied, indicating that quality practices may become increasingly diverse under the revi

Educational technology (Edtech) investors have become increasingly influential in education; however, they remain under-researched. We address this deficit and introduce the grammar and landscape of Edtech investment into education research. We empirically examine venture capital Edtech investors and argue that they are economic and political actors. Investors construct the Edtech industry through their investment and advancing particular imaginaries. They legitimate their authority in education through narratives of expertise and measures of social impact. They consolidate the Edtech industry by constructing social networks to perform the political work of futuring. The analysis provides original insights into the power of Edtech investors in education and proposes a research agenda examining new relations between the education, technology, and finance industries.

There has been a clear shift in the literature from employability as the acquisition of skills to employability as an active and socially constructed process that unfolds over time and across contexts. Yet there has been limited research on graduates’ career journeys and the development of employability capitals over time using Tomlinson’s (2017) graduate capital model. This study aims to add to this small body of literature by examining the development and usage of employability capitals over time among first-generation graduates, who have received little attention in the literature. Tomlinson’s graduate capital model, which is positioned as a more nuanced conceptualisation of employability, was chosen as the study’s main theoretical framework and the model’s usefulness in the study of employability was examined. A narrative inquiry research design was employed to elicit the career stories of five firstgeneration graduates who graduated from UK universities approximately ten years ago. Schlossberg’s transition theory was used to organise the central themes because career transitions were a significant feature in the participants’ narratives. A main finding of the study was that, while capital accumulation and deployment can assist career transitions, it was unclear from the career stories how developing capitals can support successful and sustainable employment when professional development is not always supported in the workplace. This study offers a critique of the graduate capital model by highlighting its shortterm, static nature, which prioritises the exchange value of graduate labour over long-term employment fulfilment. The career stories indicated that employability is a fluid and organic process, in contrast to the graduate capital model's strategic approach to capital formation and utilisation. This study demonstrates the need to move away from a static, individual-centred view of employability and towards one that considers long-term working conditions a

Students, academics, and higher education institutions’ administrators and leaders use digital platforms in their everyday work. A diversity of platforms offer various services, target different clients, and include different business models. Most of these platforms are proprietary and form the edtech industry. We should pay attention to the specific economic form of coordination in which digitalization of and in higher education is expanding, namely assetization.

Educational technology is the focus of increasing financial investment. In this article, we examine how edtech investors imagine and invest in the future of higher education through an empirical case study of a UK investing company. Utilising concepts and methods from economic sociology, we analyse how investment companies engage in techno-financial ‘futuring’ practices. We identify two kinds of futuring practices. First, investors’ imaginary practices produce qualitative ‘fictional expectations’ about the future of education, supported by quantitative financial valuation practices that predict the monetary returns on investment available from funding edtech. Second, we analyse the specific investment-supporting operations of edtech investors, highlighting how imagined futures of education are funded into existence (or not) as investors select and support edtech products or services. In these ways, imaginaries of the future may be materialised in educational institutions through financial investments in specific edtech products. We particularly trace how investment imaginaries and operations shift from edtech markets as selling commodities to edtech industry controlling digital products and resources as assets. Therefore, the two identified complementary futuring practices function as processes of ‘assetisation’, aimed at turning educational services and resources into digital assets with calculable future value for edtech investors.

Since the 1980s the marketisation of higher education has been profound in the United Kingdom. To assemble coherence that higher education can function as a market, students have been conceptualised as consumers in national higher education policy. As consumers they are rational, employment driven, economic agents who through choice, drive competition, sector behaviour and economic outcomes. Although the student consumer may be normalised in national policy rhetoric, corresponding to its rise is research that challenges the construct and offers a range of non-market-based alternatives for what a student should be. Actors beyond the State such as the National Union of Students (NUS) and Universities United Kingdom (UUK) have roles to play in influencing higher education policy and they offer alternative conceptualisations of students. Within the turbulence of the global pandemic there is a unique opportunity to examine these actors and how the crisis opened up opportunities for them to challenge the student consumer construct. This research engages the strategic-relational approach to understand how the strategic interplays of structure and agency challenged and created coherence around the student consumer. It employs critical policy analysis and discourse analysis to problematise policies and identify conceptualisation of students in the public facing consultations and statements made by these key actors. To conduct this research 105 documents including consultations, regulatory notices, press releases, letters, speeches and briefing notes produced by the actors between 11 March to 3 July 2020 have been identified and analysed. What is revealed is that in the earliest stages of the pandemic new opportunities to challenge and alter the student consumer construct did appear. However, the dynamic power struggles of the actors and the existing structure worked together to enable the reconstruction and re-institutionalisation of an even stronger student consumer. The se

The education sector is fast digitalising all of its operations. A large part is driven by proprietary digital products and services developed and offered by for-profit companies that form the education technology industry. This article aims to introduce a theoretical focus of rentiership and assetization into the study of the political economy of education technology. It discusses five potential transformations that the education sector is undergoing as a consequence of digital rentiership. These transformation address new rentee and potential rentier roles of education institutions, nestedness of digital platforms and their terms of use, a rise of contractual governance within the education sector, re-institutionalising the sector, and tensions between competition and monopoly in digital education markets. These trends are not exhaustive and represent only the start of the analysis on rentiership in education. The paper concludes with an invitation for future research.