Stephen Downes

Tensions between for-profits and non-profit educational institutions. On the one hand, a vice president from the for-profit Kaplan Higher Education argues "faculty at nonprofits need to embrace the data-driven assessments of teaching and learning that are commonly used by for-profit institutions." On the other hand, a journalist notes, "the biggest objection to [regulation] has come from the fact that The Washington Post would go out of business if Kaplan went out of business... Because The Washington Post money all comes from Kaplan."

Related: Richard Hall on on technology, outsourcing and the privatisation of higher education: "This is an emerging crisis of the public space, which re-focuses our need to raise major questions of technology-in-education. Where are the spaces for partnerships of students-as-producers, or communities-as-producers with institutions or academic staff? What is the idea of the university where HE seems to be focused on consumption of data, networks, learning, resources, and the curriculum, and migrating this consumption to the cloud? Who should control the means of production in HE?"