Currently reading Bedeker (2026): “Navigating the university PedTech Wonderland: a Freirean critique of technology-enhanced learning in higher education”
I have been thinking a lot about what platform to host our MOOC on and how that decision locks us into a lot of things, for example to certify completion of the course and with that requirements to use quizzes and peer-review, but also more generally the ways in which participants can interact, can navigate content, can shape and co-create the experience (or not). And of course when it comes to our regular courses, we are fully locked into Canvas, where we are currently exploring lots of plugins to try and ensure that students still learn something despite AI being available everywhere. But rather than trying to fix a system that maybe wasn’t really serving learning in the first place, what if we thought about what functionality we actually need to support learning the way we want to do it, and why, and then find or build the systems that can provide that?
Bedeker (2026) in “Navigating the university PedTech Wonderland: a Freirean critique of technology-enhanced learning in higher education” makes a similar point, stressing that while new technologies often come with the promise of transforming education, their adoption usually happens in ways that reproduce the existing pattern and culture so that even if there was the potential for transformation, it is typically not realized. The discussion in the literature is often more about benefits of online and/or asynchronous learning, like flexibility for learners, or challenges like maintaining teacher presence, than about how we think it contributes to learning. Evaluations are often either about whether students liked it or about easily quantifiable measures of performance. But what’s the pedagogical purpose of technology in learning?
Since “the critical questions Freire posed about the purposes of education, the relationship between teachers and learners, and the struggle for humanisation in oppressive systems remain strikingly relevant“, Bedeker (2026) reminds us that “teaching is never a technical act but a form of ethical intervention in the world” (my emphasis). Across many different interpretations of Freire’s work, they all agree on the “commitment to teaching as a political and relational act, a refusal to separate knowledge from power, or education from the broader struggle for justice“.
What does that mean in a LMS where only teachers can upload readings, generate quizzes, schedule meetings? Bedeker (2026) points out that the focus in LMSs is often on content delivery and assessment tracking, compliance and engagement metrics, over genuine shared meaning making and critical thinking. And I can definitely recognize that as a trap! Right now, I am exploring a Canvas plugin for social annotation with features such as quizzes that need to be completed before students can access the rest of the reading, discussion threads where the teacher can decide whether engagement was sufficient or not, with the intention of eliciting real engagement with a text by teaching students what type of questions to ask themselves when reading, and letting them create a shared understanding in those discussions. But maybe all I do with it is enforce compliance and take away student agency? Bedeker (2026) reports on other authors that find that “despite widespread rhetorical commitment to dialogue and emancipation, most digital initiatives in education remain at the level of theoretical reflection or procedural practice, seldom achieving authentic co-construction of knowledge“, and it is quite possible that they would also find that when looking at my course.
So what to do about that? “From a Freirean perspective, what is missing is dialogue as an ongoing, relational process of questioning and sense-making, not just the exchange of information“. According to Bedeker (2026), this means “positioning students not as recipients but as co-designers of learning: collaboratively curating readings, rewriting sections of the syllabus, and constructing assessment tasks that reflect their lived realities and disciplinary interests. Such higher-order online tasks will require students to read for a real purpose, evaluate their readings against content to motivate its relevance and contribute to the student-teacher-led syllabus, challenging the procedural logic of digital platforms and enabling students to become knowledge creators within and beyond the digital classroom“. They suggest this could mean blogging or creating youtube videos, facilitating teacher workshops, or submitting work to real-life applications like conferences. Content, perspective, framing would not be prescribed by teacher but researched by students — for example in local languages, from oral histories, whatever is personally relevant and meaningful for the students. “Technology, then, is repurposed not as a tool for compliance but as a platform for the validation and co-construction of diverse knowledges”
We are trying to bring that approach to life with our MOOC, by inviting our extended network to contribute through recorded video interviews and other means, and by trying to reach out beyond the people and perspectives we are familiar with, issuing an open invitation for anyone to contribute who would be interested in doing so. We invite people to comment on the platform, to engage with the content on social media. At the same time, we are doing that on a platform that we design and control, likely moderating comments to weed out spam (but at the same time potentially also steering the conversation, or at least we could be perceived as doing so). A more open model could be something like the #MOOCMOOC that I participated in a long time ago. But even with such a format what Bedeker (2026) writes it still holds: “technology is never pedagogically neutral, and digital spaces must be interrogated for how they structure epistemic access, authority, and inclusion“.
Bedeker (2026) ends the article with the recommendation to “Evaluate AI and digital systems for their potential to democratise, not standardise, access to knowledge and dialogue” (my emphasis). Building our own platform with the goal to make our content both freely available to anyone and also open for critique, discussion, sharing or addition from anyone is surely a step in the right direction then? It somehow feel strangely healing and hopeful and inspiring to read this article!
Bedeker, M. (2026). Navigating the university PedTech Wonderland: a Freirean critique of technology-enhanced learning in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 31(2), 323-337.
It has been hazy a lot recently!
But dipping is awesome as always…
