Big tech and implications for higher education

Tech giants  – particularly Google and Microsoft – have become, in many cases, de facto mediators to fundamental rights such as access to information and the right to education. 

Professor Tel Amiel believes this should be a concern for all those in the educational space: “The massive amounts of data and/or metadata produced within these platforms by millions of students (many of whom are children), faculty and staff flow freely to these private companies. This data is incredibly attractive to these corporations, if nothing else, for product improvement and evaluation, but particularly for how they contribute to the stake these companies have in the advertising market.

“These platforms are not simply tools at the service of teachers and students; they play a far more pivotal role in educational governance. Platforms ingrain themselves, at a scale, into the fabric of educational systems and institutions, centralising key services and processes: these include authentication, e-mail and communication tools, file sharing and hosting, and record keeping. Because they are not based on free software and do not use open standards, they predictably lead to technological lock-in and reduce data and infrastructural sovereignty and innovations, particularly for poorer nations in the Global South.”

Professor Amiel said the situation is similar on the African continent to that of South America according to data they have researched (Microsoft and Google won’t make the information public). He said that of the 1170 public higher education institutions in Africa, 59% are associated with either Google or Microsoft for some service.

“Teachers want to collaborate but platformisation is encroaching in higher education to such a degree that it’s making open education difficult. What has become a really important theme for UNESCO is for institutions to use open resources and tools as an integral part of making open education practices happen.

“As the UNESCO 2023 GEM Report makes clear, during the CoViD-19 pandemic, access to education globally was made possible only through emergency remote teaching. Many of the favoured solutions were cloud-based, private, proprietary educational software platforms such as Microsoft 365 for Education and Google Workspace for Education. Often these were provided by big tech for ‘free’ to state systems and institutions at all levels of education all over the world,” he said.

“However, they’re not just a service that you hire like a video conferencing system, but they are all encompassing and have access to your authentication and information systems as well as your communications while seeing your productivity. Universities – their staff and students – produce content that is put on these platforms continually and they collect this data – images, documents, reports, statistics, research output … everything. But they also collect metadata and the behavioural traces that we leave behind.”

Professor Amiel said that many of these Big Tech services are no longer free.

“About two years ago, services became reduced. Universities were no longer allowed to use unlimited data; they were reduced to 100 terabytes. People were not happy with this reduction of storage and features and so most institutions ended up paying for services.

Ironically, a lot of the services went back to what was really bad before and while we believed that we were switching to something better, we were back to square one. And as you have all your data there, it is really complicated to change services and that should worry us.

“The marketing model for these Big Tech companies is for consumers to use it for their whole lifetime – they want to make young children start using something like Google Workspace For Education because they want to keep them faithful to the product. By the time they get to university, that’s all they know. They and the institution have become locked in,” he explained.

Institutions, said Professor Amiel, started adopting these services after being approached by Big Tech themselves. Now Big Tech are influencing governments to encourage institutions to adopt these platforms, something that has happened in Brazil.

Institutions have also gone to Big Tech to ask how they can save money and use their services: “There has been a reversal of roles. Another player are national research networks who have become brokers for these corporations as well. In some countries, they’re really careful brokers, demanding that services respond to public values, and in others they’re not!

“Staff at universities have also become ‘workers’ for these private corporations. You now have technical staff that become the first layer of support. So if you have a problem, you are supposed to talk to your university, not Microsoft or Google. Universities also have professional development staff to teach people how to use the Big Tech product,” he said.

“So the myth of being ‘free’ breaks down immediately because you have staff working for these corporations and you have technical staff providing first layers of support. We have students whose email doesn’t work after a few months and they will approach Microsoft who refers them back to the university who says it isn’t their problem. So there’s a governance issue with that as well. Nobody is responsible or accountable. They have become dependent on the system once they adopt it. Getting out of Microsoft or Google is really hard to do once you’re in.”

He says external people are also drawn in: “In some cases, if a parent wants to know what is happening with their child at a school, they have to create a Google account.

“However, what we should be most concerned about is these platforms becoming intermediaries to the right to education; these are public institutions that now have private intermediaries. That’s a huge issue.”

He quoted the German-born American philosopher Albert Borgmann: “To extol the consumer is to deny the citizen. When consumers begin to act, the fundamental decisions have already been made.”

“We need to examine policy on a large scale in terms of the institution and state. Concrete examples exist of educational platforms and services that are wholly or partially public, or are at least diligently vetted by those who work for the state. These include the public values-oriented programmes at SURF in the Netherlands. When Google wanted to enter the European market through the Netherlands, they went to the Dutch authorities who said they could enter the market if they agreed to a suite of principles, values based on their procurement model.”

Professor Amiel said Google resisted but when the Dutch would not back down, they agreed to abide by the rules given to them: “It worked out well and the Dutch got a completely different offering of Google Workspace for Education than most of us do.”

He also praised the Sciebo initiative in Germany and said it was cheaper and  better than private platforms. (Sciebo, short for “science box“, is a non-commercial cloud storage service for research, studying and teaching. It is operated jointly by 22 universities in North-Rhine/Westphalia and funded by the state of NRW).

He advised educators to investigate the Open Education Policy Game, which was relaunched this year by the UNESCO Chair in Open Education and Technologies for the Common Good. Since its beginning, the Game has been an essential tool for collaborative diagnostics and implementing open educational policies in institutions committed to democratising knowledge. The new version of the Game emphasises open practices, collaboration, sustainability, shared management, public digital goods and digital rights.

Professor Amiel believes that educators need to urgently examine the role of technology in the future perspective of education and not simply see it as a tool they must use. They need to scrutinise legal, technical and moral issues to build and create their policies. Global universities need to talk to each other and share best practices.

In order to achieve sustainable educational infrastructures and guarantee the right to education, adopting educational services and platforms based simply on cost reduction and technical efficiency will not suffice, he believes.

“Other values must come to the forefront, such as transparency and democratic participation, which are aligned with the common good. In order to achieve this, the state – and the public – must have clear stewardship in how we envision and govern technical infrastructures in education. We need collective solutions. Sometimes, we sit back and think that these big tech influences in our lives are something that are inevitable and that you can’t get away from Instagram, from Meta, from Google. But we can make a difference if we come up with collective solutions.”

Janine Greenleaf Walker  is a contract writer for Universities South Africa.