Education (Digital and Social Change) (Taught)

The information provided on this page was correct at the time of publication (November 2025). For complete and up-to-date information about this course, please visit the relevant University of Oxford course page via www.graduate.ox.ac.uk/ucas.

The MSc Education (Digital and Social Change) is an exciting and innovative course, in which you will develop a strong theoretical understanding of new technologies, education and society.

At the core of the MSc is a strong commitment to digital inclusion and social justice that addresses contemporary issues regarding the impact of digital and social change in education.

At a time when many people are discussing significant moral questions regarding technology and its use in education, including for example, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, there is a pressing need for a new generation of researchers and practitioners that can affect social change through stronger theoretically-informed practice, research, design and policy.

The course covers topics such as:

• Key Concepts in Digital Education: What is technology and what is the purpose of Education? How might we theorise how people learn with technologies? How can we conceptualise and enable social change in education?

• Social Justice and Technology: How can we make social justice an underpinning principle of technology design, development, implementation and evaluation? What are the controversies and debates regarding the role of technology in global contexts?

• Education, the Internet and Society: How might we understand society in a digital era and what implications does this have for education? What kinds of educational futures do we wish to create?

• Critical Digital Innovation: What are the potential benefits, emerging risks, and inevitable trade-offs involved in the design and development of educational technologies, particularly given advances in AI? How might we use inclusive design approaches to work with marginalised communities?

The department welcomes students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including but not limited to education, computer science, sociology, communications and international development. You will have a commitment to social justice in education, a questioning stance on technology and an interest in developing interdisciplinary knowledge.

The course aims to help you develop the skills to:

• Critically assess and understand the role of technology in education across the life course

• Develop the expertise to address the challenges posed by digital inequality

• Understand how to embed innovative learning technologies in practice

• Cultivate research and design prototyping skills

• Understand the relationship between social justice, technology and learning.

By the end of the course you will develop:

• The ability to integrate educational theory and practice

• An in-depth and comparative understanding of learning theories and their appropriate use to develop informative research questions

• The necessary research skills for progression to the next stage of your career, including doctoral study

• Specialist technical and social knowledge, enabling the critical evaluation of technologies for digital and social change

• An understanding of the ethics of technology when working with marginalised communities

• Informed insights about the state-of-the-art technologies, such as artificial intelligence and the ability to critically evaluate their application to, and limitations for, digital and social change in education

• The ability to develop and manage a research project, and work collaboratively and reflectively on contemporary research issues.