if amazon ran your student portal...

Amazon have moved from selling products to services, when you go to shop with them now you can buy the book or whatever new, or second hand from affiliates, or from some kind of affiliated auction site – all through the Amazon portal. Amazon, of course, get a fee no matter who you buy it from within their portal, but what they are really after is the data from the transaction. Because they can then hound you with offers and suggestions.

We were invited to imagine an Amazon portal for our university, where they hound students to death eg about the modules they need to do to complete, where they emails saying things like “this is the book the smart people who passed first time bought” and “there are five places left for next semester on that module you need, and we are auctioning them off today, place your bid at….