ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

教育部门正在快速数字化其所有业务。很大一部分是由形成教育技术行业的营利性公司开发和提供的专有数字产品和服务驱动的。本文旨在将食利权和资产化的理论重点引入教育技术政治经济学的研究中。它讨论了教育部门由于数字食租制度而正在经历的五种潜在转变。这些转型解决了教育机构新的承租人和潜在的承租人角色、数字平台的嵌套及其使用条款、教育部门合同治理的兴起、该部门的重新制度化以及数字教育市场竞争与垄断之间的紧张关系。这些趋势并非详尽无遗，仅代表教育食利主义分析的开始。论文的结尾是对未来研究的邀请。