Log into any university’s learning platform, and you’ll find the same architecture: weeks arranged in folders, drop-down menus for quizzes and discussion forums, settings for participation tracking. These aren’t pedagogical decisions; they’re platform defaults. And yet, increasingly, they shape what teaching can be.

For many academics and instructional designers, the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) is the starting point for course design. Not because it’s the best pedagogical tool, but because it’s there – preconfigured, institutionally endorsed, and backed by IT support. Over time, the convenience of templates and automation begins to define what is considered “good” or even “possible” in teaching.

This post argues that this situation must be reversed. If pedagogy is to be meaningful, democratic, and just, it must come before the platform.

Most digital tools used in higher education encode specific assumptions about how learning works. The LMS is designed for content delivery, sequencing, assessment, and tracking. Its metaphors – modules, folders, completion status – encourage linear, bounded, and teacher-directed learning.

Even features designed to “enhance engagement” often reproduce a managerial logic. Learning analytics dashboards promise insight into student behaviour, but often measure presence, not participation; clicks, not criticality (Prinsloo & Slade, 2017). Automated quizzes, plagiarism detectors, and AI-based marking tools offer efficiency but risk reducing learning to pattern recognition.

This is not a call to abandon platforms – they can be useful, even necessary. But their design must not substitute for pedagogical intent. When we uncritically accept the tool’s architecture, we allow it to make pedagogical choices for us.

Critical Digital Pedagogy offers a way to resist this logic. Rooted in critical theory and emancipatory traditions, it insists that education is a political and ethical act – never neutral, and never reducible to technical processes (Stommel, 2014; Morris & Stommel, 2018).

From this perspective, technology is not simply a medium but a site of power and contestation. Questions of agency, access, voice, and control must be foregrounded. As Jesse Stommel writes, “We must question the tools we use and the contexts in which we use them, because tools shape us as much as we shape them” (Stommel, 2014).

Pedagogy must lead. Digital tools should be chosen and shaped in service of dialogue, relationality, and justice – not convenience or efficiency.

The belief that technology will “fix” education is a persistent and seductive myth. We are told that AI will personalise learning, that analytics will help us understand students, that platforms will scale quality teaching. But these narratives often mask a deeper problem: the automation of pedagogical judgement in the name of efficiency.

This is a form of technological determinism – the idea that technological innovation drives social change, regardless of context or intention. In higher education, it aligns comfortably with neoliberal imperatives: do more with less, monitor everything, reduce complexity to metrics.

Ben Williamson (2016) has shown how data systems like real-time dashboards and predictive analytics are becoming policy instruments – not just passive tools, but active agents in shaping decisions and practices across the education sector. This datafied governance of education risks turning the messy work of learning into a neat stream of data points to be monitored and optimised.

Paolo Landri (2018) extends this analysis by examining how the Europeanisation of education is increasingly mediated by technical standards and digital infrastructures. He argues that education governance is no longer confined to policy documents or ministerial decisions - it is embedded in code, in protocols, in platforms. The standardisation of teaching practices through platform features effectively enacts policy from within, often invisibly, reconfiguring teacher autonomy and institutional control. In this sense, platforms are not neutral tools; they are political agents in the digital governance of education.

Reversing the logic means starting with educational purpose, not technological affordance. It means asking:

• What kind of learning do we want to foster?
• What relationships do we want to build?
• What values should structure our course design?

Only then should we turn to the digital tools – selecting, configuring, or even refusing them based on how well they support those intentions.

This may require resisting default settings. It may mean using a discussion board not to track posts, but to host a messy, ongoing dialogue. It may mean designing assessments that can’t be automated. It may mean challenging procurement decisions that privilege data extraction over student agency.

This post sets the stage for a broader conversation about reclaiming pedagogy in a platformed world. Over the next five posts, I’ll explore:

• The hidden curriculum of the LMS
• The automation of judgement through AI-based assessment
• The need for educators to shape digital policy
• Alternatives to dominant platform models
• A concluding manifesto for digital pedagogy and practice

Together, these posts argue that educational technology is too important to be left to platforms, vendors, or procurement committees. If we care about justice, agency, and learning, then pedagogy must come first.

When we let platforms define pedagogy, we risk narrowing education to what can be measured, managed, and monetised. But when we start from pedagogy – critical, dialogic, and purposeful – we open space for something more expansive, more human.

Digital education isn’t neutral. So let’s not be neutral about it.

• Landri, P. (2018). Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and Europeanization of Education. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [16 May 2025].
• Morris, S. M. and Stommel, J. (2018). An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing. Available at: https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/
• Prinsloo, P. and Slade, S. (2017). Ethics and Learning Analytics: Charting the (Un)Charted. In: Lang, C., Siemens, G., Wise, A. and Gašević, D. (eds.) Handbook of Learning Analytics. Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR), pp. 49–57. https://doi.org/10.18608/hla17.004
• Stommel, J. (2014). Critical Digital Pedagogy: a definition. Hybrid Pedagogy. Available at: https://hybridpedagogy.org/critical-digital-pedagogy-definition/
• Williamson, B. (2016). Digital education governance: Data visualization, predictive analytics, and ‘real-time’ policy instruments. Journal of Education Policy, 31(2), pp. 123–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2015.1035758