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This paper critically examines the digital transformation in higher education, arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift where pedagogical purpose is increasingly eclipsed by technological functionality. Metaphorically framing the contemporary university as a PedTech Wonderland, I explore the disorienting landscape where platform-driven logics displace meaningful engagement, and conventional pedagogies offer little guidance. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, the paper challenges celebratory narratives that equate teaching innovation with technological advancement, exposing how digital tools often reproduce dominant hierarchies rather than disrupt them. The paper concludes that technology-enhanced learning (TEL) must be reclaimed as a pedagogical practice that centres critical inquiry, dialogue, and student agency, rather than procedural compliance and data-driven efficiency. Unless digital education is reoriented in this way, higher education risks remaining the university of the past – its glittering tech platforms masking old inequities – instead of realising the liberatory promise of the university of the future.
Michelle Bedeker (Thu,) studied this question.