Online, Free and with AI Teachers

could this be true?

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/10/17/future-education-online-free-and-with-ai-teachers.aspx

 

Sure it could be true. Isn't this the "MOOC" vision?

Every other job is being automated, why not university professors?

AIs aren't going to demand tenure, unionize or start bleating about how their "academic freedom" is being impinged when they can't do anything they please.

That kind of thing might not be equally appropriate for every subject. How will it grade essays?

It might be most appropriate for the language classes the people in the article are using it for, or for something like beginning math and science classes, where students solve problems that have unambiguous answers and there isn't really a whole lot of scope for improvisation around the questions. I don't see something like this successfully teaching philosophy. Or more advanced math and science either.

Yes, there's that.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle it faces isn't technological, it's social. Educational credentials are only as good as their acceptance. And we can expect that the academic profession isn't happy with these kind of developments. Nobody made introduction of factory robots contingent on their acceptance by factory workers, but that's what we are doing when we ask human academics to recognize MOOC diplomas.

 

They can be programmed to impart the values of the programmers or of who controls the programmers.

 

That's already the case, more or less.

 

similar subject, different source

https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2018/10/16/this-company-could-be-your-next-teacher-coursera-plots-a-massive-future-for-online-education/#1097ca42a39b