Technology-enabled entrepreneurship in higher education today is often justified based on claims that it will expand access to education and eliminate inequities in the learning process. But evaluating claims about future consequences of current innovation is impossible. We therefore turn to the history of how education entrepreneurs capitalized new communications technologies and the consequences of these ventures for the long-term development of higher education. We examine three previous technological innovations – the advent of inexpensive printing and distribution through the mail in the 19th century; the introduction of educational radio and television in the mid-20th century, and the rise of the internet in the early 21st century.
For each, we consider how the entrepreneurial imaginations of each venture critiqued the status quo in higher education and explore the moral consequences of these ventures on equity and justice in two distinct ways: first, we trace how these new technologies broadened access to higher education for minoritized groups previously excluded from higher education. Second, we explore how these technologies shaped discourse about the means and ends of learning in higher education.
We find that, despite their implicit and explicit moral critiques of the status quo, the moral valence of educational technology as emancipatory and liberatory is ambivalent and historically contingent. In other words, the moral consequences of educational technology innovation do not follow from the entrepreneurial imaginations underpinning their founding. Rather, the moral consequences of any adopted educational technology innovation depend on four intersecting historically contingent mediators: the state, through regulation and public policy; the market, through competition within and outside higher education; the academy, for institutional legitimacy and administrative support; and the inequitable ‘pre-existing conditions’ of the social structure. Building from these cases, we offer insights for the contemporary study of educational technology that could illuminate the issues raised through our historical analysis.