Apple’s online professional learning conferences: governing global education by tethering teachers to EdTech

While the digitalisation of schooling and rise of EdTech are often examined through their effects on teachers and classroom practice, we argue that critical enquiry must also examine how the EdTech industry shapes the global governance of education. Informed by critical literature on digital policy sociology and platformed governance, this paper explores how Apple Professional Learning – the digital learning platform of Apple Inc. – forges digitally mediated relations between otherwise disparate schooling spaces and actors. Drawing on our ethnographic experiences of the Apple Festival of Learning and Apple Back to School online conferences, we show how these events operate through three interrelated processes: (i) inspiration, by circulating teacher-generated expertise; (ii) legitimation, by adopting the conventions and credentials of recognised professional learning; and (iii) commercialisation, by cultivating material and discursive ‘buy-in’ to Apple’s technological ecosystem. Together, these processes position Apple as a global for-profit EdTech provider, a broker of teacher professional knowledge and a legitimate source of pedagogical authority. We conclude that such conferences, alongside Apple’s broader educational products and services, enable EdTech firms to extend their commercial and reputational reach while assuming functions conventionally associated with public and professional educational authorities.