Universidad, plataformización y datificación. La nueva cara del capitalismo cognitivo en la educación superior

This article aims to reflect on the new nuances that cognitive capitalism in higher education is acquiring through platformization and datafication processes, especially in virtual education programmes. These two phenomena are interrelated, come from the economic field, and are applied to the educational world as mechanisms to standardise, simplify, track, and forecast educational processes. The thesis here is that this new condition of cognitive capitalism, on the one hand, commodifies the personal data of educational stakeholders, now users and customers, through a new mode of data mining, which is subject to sale and purchase for profit thus reducing the autonomy of higher education institutions. On the other hand, as part of the discourses on interaction and educational democratisation in virtual educational environments, platformization and datafication reduce such processes and affect the very pedagogical meaning of educational practice.