Teachers are being replaced by software.
And the reason we need to fire the bad ones is that, unlike software, you can't just replicate their product wherever you need and let the bad ones wilt away through neglect.
And the reason we need to fire the bad ones is that, unlike software, you can't just replicate their product wherever you need and let the bad ones wilt away through neglect.
I've taken a couple MOOCs, and have not been terribly impressed with the mechanical grading algorithms.
Teachers may be replaced by software, but I don't believe the substitution is of equal for equal.
|| What is Open Teaching?
|| Open teaching means teaching using open materials and providing open access to those materials on the internet.
I gotta say I agree, I would love to see a future where the teachers are curating the content rather than the assigned curriculum. But those bad teachers, they've really come to rely on their curriculums.
P.S. looking forward to see what you guys come up with!
Good curriculums are covering over a lot of poor teaching.
Writing a good curriculum is hard and it's exceptionally difficult to do that as a lone teacher for a novel course. The results will be variable, and this is where you will the very most awful courses.
I couldn't agree more about the difficulty in creating a good curriculum. The big question in our minds becomes whether or not a decentralized and distributed system can create great curricula and reduce the pressure on that lone teacher. I believe the answer is yes and with such a system we end up with better courses.
What do you mean by being a guide ?
You're talking about a very hard problem. Something like Knewton will never replace human teachers.
And why is replacing human teachers desirable, anyway? If anyone succeeded at it (and no one will) it would probably be bad, on the whole, for society. If no one can make money teaching, the value of knowledge goes down. That would just lead to ignorance and bolster the already obnoxious anti-intellectualism of American society.
At least in math, spotting areas of difficulty for students based on data on previous exercises and data from other students does seem possible.
These systems rely on humans to curate the conceptual difficulties associated with each problem separately, but those lists are never complete and often just confuse the student further.
Some systems don't even try to do what you're suggesting, and just give students the "right" way to solve the problem at hand after a certain number of attempts. These are by far the worst, as it's painfully easy to game the system.