Covid-19 has forced universities to move classes online, this has been made possible through tools such as Zoom and Webex and other online programme management providers (OPMs). By and large this has been a positive development for the education sector, but there are concerns that the move online has caused a casualisation of Higher Education work.
Research done by Mariya Ivancheva suggests that before the pandemic, universities were increasingly championing academic research over teaching, particularly in top-ranked universities. Students were therefore often taught by faculty and assisted by academically trained workers in administrative and academic related positions.
The introduction of online learning combined with commercially driven forms of online education has meant that the burden placed on these sorts of faculty in well off universities and on teachers in other universities has increased exponentially. Consequently, the pressure and alienation many academics are feeling has increased severely. This manifests through several points:
- Increasingly, online systems of learning have led to the annihilation of space and time, the unfettered flow and transmission of knowledge as pure information content has led to the standardisation of content and has deskilled teaching.
- Visions of higher education as a targeted service that student consumers can mix and match according to job market demands.
- Less requirement for the physical presence of faculty on campus and thus pushing the precarious teaching workforce out of the ‘real’ academic community, combined with the requirement for academics to use their own devices, spaces and facilities.
Before the pandemic, OPMs partnered with universities to deliver services. Currently there are 60 world players that reach roughly over three billion people.
OPMs get 50-70% of course fee revenue and access to profitable big data from students in return for start-up capital, risk absorption, platform, marketing and recruitment aid. A difference however between OPMs, and others within the sector is that OPMs do not offer the frills of university, but provide the core business of university: curriculum design and delivery, teaching, student support and supervision.
To do that they rely on the labour of university-hired academics alongside that of academically trained OPM employed academics who do low paid jobs on short contracts. OPMs also use the established brands of universities to sell their product.
The Covid-19 pandemic has sped up a process which was already underway. Using university brands which generate income from student fees, university-OPM partnerships have opened a new page in the de-professionalisation and fragmentation of academic labour.
With content now put online and aided by workers often trained to a postgraduate or post PHD level, university-OPM partnerships are now using two types of poorly paid labour:
- University hired academics whose workloads intensifies all at once to absorb a second shift of online teaching often with little extra support.
- De-professionalised contract labour, outsourced academics hired through OPMs.
International Higher Education 