Abstract

ARTOPOULOS, Alejandro; HUARTE, Jimena  and  RIVOIR, Ana. Simulation and Learning Platforms. Propuesta educativa (Online) [online]. 2020, n.53, pp.25-44. ISSN 1995-7785.

The COVID-19 pandemic, an exceptional event in many dimensions, put on the agenda of world education policy to maintain the school with social distance through hybrid face-to-face/online class strategies. When the gaps and injustices were no longer just "digital", technology, as it often is, took the place of the mainstay of activities, including education.

In the "new normality", platforms support the continuity of work (teleworking), the economy (e-commerce) and everyday life (online delivery). Apparently simple, often reified, they facilitate the execution of complex operations. However, we know little about them. We confuse them with apps, websites, systems, panopticals or media. Born both from free software and from the frenetic bubbles of Silicon Valley, while supporting teleactivity, they act as bulldozers of "creative" destruction, precaritating forms of work, hacking democracies and monopolizing economies.

Our analysis attempts to shed light on these socio-technical constructions, at once assemblages of business and cultural battles, to distinguish multiple shades of grey open to collective action when the mechanisms of their black boxes are made visible. In our research, when facing the platformization of education in Latin America, we found that the intensity and scope of such processes result from the convergence of public policy initiatives and regulatory agendas, from the impulse of the ICT industry and from the techno-social leadership of civil society.

Keywords : Online Education; Digital Education; Platforms; Learning Platforms; Pandemic COVID-19; Platformization.