Platforms reward attention; universities are supposed to reward knowledge. When attention metrics govern curricula, we outsource academic judgment to the crowd. This piece explains why course design that chases engagement undermines the very promise students buy: selective difficulty that produces capability. I argue for a deliberate separation of platform logic from academic decision-making—keeping digital tools but rejecting their governance.
If the university had a Like button, it would be a small confession of defeat. A button is a decision protocol: click, register, rank. Platforms are built to harvest these clicks and, in return, arrange the world so that more will come. Their basic code is attention/not-attention. Universities are built to harvest something else: the slow conversion of confusion into capability. Their code is truth/not-truth in the domain of knowledge, and qualification/non-qualification in the domain of education. These codes can borrow from each other, but when attention becomes the chief arbiter of academic value, the court changes jurisdiction.
The ‘Like’ Button
We may as well be honest. The platform has already strolled into the campus wearing a lanyard: the learning management system with its heat maps of “engagement,” the dashboards that color courses in green or red, the course evaluation stars that twinkle at budget meetings. All of it feels empirical, humane, modern. It also quietly inverts who decides what counts as learning.
Platforms thrive by provoking short cycles of response. Universities thrive by cultivating long cycles of reflection. This is not a moral difference but a temporal one. The semester is slow because thinking, like fermentation, resists haste. The feed is fast because attention, like sugar, is cheap and addictive. Mix the two, and you breed an organism that metabolizes sugar while declaring loyalty to nutrients.
Consider the innocuous phrase: engagement. Engagement is to learning what mood is to romance: relevant, not dispositive. Painfully, learning often requires strategic disappointment. A well-designed course introduces selective difficulty—concepts that resist, problems that refuse to be completed in one sitting. This difficulty is not gatekeeping; it is the ladder that later becomes muscle memory. When engagement metrics govern course design, difficulty is trimmed where it offends. The ladder is lowered to the point where it no longer lifts.
The consequences are systematic. Curriculum smooths toward the trend—modules on “AI for Everyone” multiply while logic withers. Assessment drifts from provenance to product, as provenance is hard to quantify. Academic time is colonized by micro-rewards and perpetual notification. Faculty become content creators in their own house, anxiously refreshing the watch-time of lectures as if boredom were a legal violation.
Firebreaks for Judgment
None of this is a call to smash the servers. The tools are not the problem; their governance is. Plumbing is wonderful; we just do not want it running the city council. Digital platforms carry messages and store work; they should not decide what a good message is or what good work looks like. The question is: does the platform report to the curriculum, or does the curriculum adapt to the platform’s reporting features?
To preserve universities as places where truth and qualification remain decisive, we need a few firebreaks—design choices that separate platform logic from academic judgment while keeping the good plumbing.
- Establish a governance firewall for analytics. Analytics are operational tools, not evaluative authorities. Use them to spot who has not logged in, not to conclude who has not learned. Prohibit the use of watch-time, click counts, and response latency as proxies for course quality or faculty performance.
- Reassert curriculum sovereignty. The syllabus is not a menu to be optimized by A/B testing; it is a constitution that distributes difficulty. Vendor features cannot mandate pedagogy. Require that substantial shifts in assessment go through peer academic bodies, not software default settings.
- Disable invisible algorithms by default. Discussion boards should be chronological unless the instructor chooses. Turn off autoplay in instructional videos; students are not binge-watching a plot. Replace engagement streaks with reflection milestones.
- Make difficulty a declared design element. In every syllabus, include a difficulty map that explains where effort will concentrate and why. Pair hard segments with structured support so that difficulty is fair, not arbitrary. Evaluate courses partly on whether they deliver this promised difficulty.
- Shift assessment toward provenance and process. Require version histories, oral defenses, or reflective memos that explain what was attempted, revised, and learned. In a world where machines draft, the human skill is to direct, critique, and justify. Grade the choreography, not only the dance.
- Practice index hygiene. Publicly declare which metrics your university refuses to optimize: watch-time, star ratings, and response rates among them. Publish what will matter instead: peer observation of teaching and external examiners for capstones.
- Add sunset clauses to administrative accretions. Any policy that adds clicks, forms, or mandatory modules should expire unless it demonstrably frees faculty time for feedback or student time for study.
Some will argue that without engagement, we lose students, and retention saves budgets. True. But retention is not education. Students remain not only for what entertains but for what changes them. The gym that keeps you attending by hiding the weights is not ethical. The economical choice is to keep students by building capability, which is the only thing that compounds.
Others will worry that students just like convenience. Of course. So do we. That is why we should spend convenience on the right things. Use platforms to remove friction from logistics—registration, deadlines, submission—and conserve friction where it produces learning—argument, practice, revision.
This is not about exclusion in disguise. Difficulty can be exclusive when it is chaotic, unannounced, or defended by mystique. But the remedy is not to remove difficulty; it is to design it. Make the ladder visible. Provide more rungs. Offer scaffolding without lowering the roof. The ultimate inequity is to graduate students into a world that will demand judgment while having trained them to seek a button.
Teaching and learning are forms of double contingency: I expect that you are trying to learn, you expect that I am trying to teach, and we both act under uncertainty. Trust bridges this uncertainty. Platforms promise to replace trust with telemetry. But telemetry cannot tell you whether silence in a seminar is laziness, confusion, or careful thinking. To interpret silence, someone must risk an intervention. This risk is what makes a teacher different from an algorithm. Risk is the price of meaning.
The ‘Because’ Button
What would a university look like that accepts platforms as tools and refuses them as governors? It would look, I suspect, less like a feed and more like a workshop. There would be fewer notifications and more appointments; fewer badges and more artifacts; fewer leaderboards and more letters of critique. Course evaluations would include narrative feedback read by peers, not just stars displayed for fear. Faculty would stop apologizing for assigning hard texts and start explaining why difficult reading is a form of respect.
And administrators? They would hold two ledgers. In one, the numbers that keep the institution solvent. In the other, the commitments that keep it intelligent. Both are necessary; confusing them is fatal.
If we must add a button to the university, let it say Because. Not Like, not Share, not Subscribe—Because. Because the argument holds. Because the method is sound. Because the difficulty was warranted. Because you changed your mind after considering the evidence. The Because button is slow, hard to press, and gives no dopamine. It offers something else: the confidence, years later, to solve what your younger self could not even name.
Newton, I sometimes think, would have made a terrible influencer. Gravity does not trend, and the Principia is a poor candidate for a thumbnail. Fortunately for him—and for us—no one asked him to upload on Thursdays. Let us extend the same courtesy to our students. Keep the tools. Disable the seduction. Build the ladder. And please, leave the Like button to the places that sell attention. We have more stubborn goods to trade.
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#re_v5 (Article 1 of 10 on global higher education issues: The LMS / Platform)