Knewton.com claims it spots student weaknesses and adapts to it. And since it can offer full attention for each student it can offer better performance than teachers.
What do you mean by being a guide ?
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.