Supervised Autonomy: The Emotional Architecture of Digital Academic Education

This lecture explores how digital academic education is being reshaped by the fusion of emotional governance and technological design. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with learning designers working in Israeli EdTech companies, I examine how these professionals—positioned between private platforms and public universities—construct educational environments that are simultaneously affective and algorithmic.

At the center of this analysis is the concept of “supervised autonomy”, which captures a core paradox: students are imagined as autonomous, self-regulating learners, yet also as emotionally vulnerable subjects in need of constant technological oversight. Surveillance technologies such as learning analytics dashboards are reframed by designers as tools of emotional care and personalized support.

This dual logic extends to the role of professors, who are reimagined as both emotional caregivers and performative presenters—expected to maintain engagement, deliver emotional connection, and respond to behavioral data. In this new emotional-technological architecture, autonomy becomes not a withdrawal from control, but a condition shaped and sustained through ongoing algorithmic monitoring and therapeutic discourse.

The lecture argues that the digitalization of academic life cannot be understood solely through the lens of market rationality. Rather, it reflects a deeper cultural reordering—where emotional expectations are embedded into digital infrastructures, and educational roles are redefined through a convergence of care, performance, and control.