Look at what's going on in US public education with the move to Core Curriculum. The focus is on reading and math, with outcomes measured via computer based testing. You think when cash-strapped state legislatures realize they could reduce the number of teachers down to a single proctor watching over self-paced computer based instruction that they won't go for it, especially when "the test" (since that's what we're doing here... teaching to the test) is computer-delivered?
This isn't to say that teachers will go away anymore than retail clerks, or buggy-whip makers or barrel makers before them, will go away, but their ranks will thin and where they are employed will change. There will still be people willing to pay for personal instruction and there will still be courses that are difficult to deliver via CBT alone.
I always thought online / computer-based education, especially for grade school, sounded terrible. But once I saw how little my kids are actually getting in public school, and especially with federal meddling ala No Child Left Behind and Core Curriculum, I would actually embrace it - at least it would be self-paced and allow more advanced students to move ahead rather than sitting bored waiting on their peers.
Look what's happening at the university level with MOOCs already. That's only going to accelerate, and university professors are teachers by another name - maybe calling it "automation" isn't exactly right, but we'll certainly see a thinning of the ranks.
Judging by the mistakes my daughter's teachers make, I would happily have her class like you describe. self-paced and continually graded. She brings home 40 math problems, it's obvious she has no trouble with some of them, yet they all need to be done. Meanwhile she struggles on subtracting negative numbers, a smarter system would be for the software teacher to recognise when she has something understood and slowly transition to the weaker areas.
In the early years when teacher is more like supervised play I think teachers better serve the children, but middle school and beyond, I'd vote to kick out all the useless teachers, keep the few that are good and massively switch to computerised learning.
In California education has sunk so low that one of my daughter's teachers explained the common core standards now being taught as a last ditch attempt to get most of the children that leave school to be able to do something as basic as read an instruction manual. Half her class are children with parents that have no more than 3rd grade education themselves, and the other half have parents that work at google, twitter, oracle etc. When parents were recently surveyed how to improve the school district, less than 2% of the immigrant parents completed the survey citing they couldn't understand the questions, which had even been translated (at an unfathomable cost of $24k) into Spanish. While we have such a huge range of abilities, a self-paced learning computerised scheme would at least mean the children that are capable of learning will do so and not just sit twiddling their thumbs while the children struggling to do last years level work soak up the educators time.
Look at what's going on in US public education with the move to Core Curriculum. The focus is on reading and math, with outcomes measured via computer based testing. You think when cash-strapped state legislatures realize they could reduce the number of teachers down to a single proctor watching over self-paced computer based instruction that they won't go for it, especially when "the test" (since that's what we're doing here... teaching to the test) is computer-delivered?
This isn't to say that teachers will go away anymore than retail clerks, or buggy-whip makers or barrel makers before them, will go away, but their ranks will thin and where they are employed will change. There will still be people willing to pay for personal instruction and there will still be courses that are difficult to deliver via CBT alone.
I always thought online / computer-based education, especially for grade school, sounded terrible. But once I saw how little my kids are actually getting in public school, and especially with federal meddling ala No Child Left Behind and Core Curriculum, I would actually embrace it - at least it would be self-paced and allow more advanced students to move ahead rather than sitting bored waiting on their peers.
Look what's happening at the university level with MOOCs already. That's only going to accelerate, and university professors are teachers by another name - maybe calling it "automation" isn't exactly right, but we'll certainly see a thinning of the ranks.