Introduction: Critical studies of digital education platforms

All over the world, education is undergoing substantial changes in the wake of rapid technological developments. As our world is becoming ever more digitized, the educational sector is increasingly infused with digital games, apps, websites, social media, and learning environments. The Covid-19 pandemic, and associated measures of social distancing and school closures all over the world, have accelerated this digitization, triggering an urgent need for critical, up-close scrutiny of how this digitization is reshaping the worlds of education. The focus of this Special Issue is especially on digital education platforms. In this introduction to the Special Issue, we set ourselves three tasks. First, we extensively unpack and delineate the concept ‘digital education platform’. We thereby identify four key features of such platforms, namely their architectural, intermediary and organizational dimensions, as well as their overall working logic of investing in educational forms. Second, we focus on the more methodological question of how to study such digital educational platforms, and we do so by introducing the various contributions to the Special Issue and how each contribution adopts a specific critical platform gaze. Third and finally, we conclude by inviting educational researchers to take seriously the challenge of adopting a critical platform gaze, but also to bring critique beyond narratives of compliance, surveillance, control and acceptance that think about education as a necessarily ‘doomed’ or technologically ‘colonized’ field.