Preamble
First of all, I don’t mean our beloved academics Ken, Jenny and John with this question. I am referring to teachers who use published learning materials and have a direct, two-way relationship with students. They could be language teachers, grade school teachers, or even university professors. The motive behind my question stems from how we might further develop our Practice Plan product which supplements our Premium subscriptions with a ten-minute daily phone call from one of our Chinese counselors. While the daily phone calls fill a gap in our service by providing (a) student motivation, (b) an outlet for questions, and (c) feedback on speaking skills, it is a different kind of business for a us - a service business, rather than the media business we have grown up with.
The Debate
A quick Google scan on the issue, reveals a very polarized debate. On one hand, you have the software developer corner who focus on the economics of education and sees a lot of ‘inefficiency’ that could be replaced by software. For example (source):
The worldwide cost of “secondary” mathematics instruction — pre-algebra through elementary calculus — is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-billion annually, and most of it goes to instructors’ salaries, he said. The enterprising programmer would find a ready market for instructional software among cost-conscious college and school administrators.
Unsurprisingly, you have teachers, whose jobs would be at stake, in the other corner arguing (source):
If technocrats eventually succeed in eliminating learned professors from American culture, our minds and hearts will die, and technologically savvy moral idiots will rule the world. Technology is a helpful supplement in the classroom, but it can never replace the learned professor.
Balancing Act
Personally, I believe extreme views are useful in helping frame an issue, but the reality is more than often between the poles. For the record, I approach this issue with a non-pedagogical background, which likely gives me a somewhat naive attitude and hence my question: what is the value of the teacher? If technology is fundamentally changing the media landscape, then it would be expected that industries relying on technology would have to re-organize and value chain entities would have to focus on what they do best.
The Value Chain
Umair Haque breaks down the differences between a Mass Media Value Chain and a Media 2.0 Value Chain in his Media Economics presentation.
The learning industry, while sharing similar characteristics with mass media differs substantially at the ‘Retail’ stage. While much of the educational publishing industry can be purchased directly in book stores, the reality is that schools and teachers currently act as a towering filter in determining what, when and how students learn. Schools and teachers are not only the most powerful figures in education, but they are also the largest cost drivers. If they could be made more efficient, learning would be less expensive and education more accessible. As a company dedicated to shifting market power into the hands of end learners, we believe this is a fundamental issue to what we are trying to accomplish.
In a scenario where lesson podcasts, crafted by academic experts, could provide the instructional input, what roles remain for the teacher? Which of these could be replaced by software or software-enabled community (and therefore be made cheaper)?
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Whiteboard: Roles of the Teacher
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- student motivation
- study organization and scheduling
- outlet for questions
- feedback on performance
- guru for further study
Are teachers fated to be replaced by software? Or are there characteristics of the teacher that are irreplaceable (what would they be?) that can only be supplemented by software?
Hank
Humor, kindness, caring, concern, warmth, joy, anger, love, exuberance, fear, happiness, desire, despair, curiosity, shall I go on?
Frankly, what I understand you to say is that by eliminating teachers we can reduce the cost of education. Fine (perhaps) for self-motivated adults but I don’t want my children taught by heartless, soul less, emotionless machines.
And frankly I don’t think most children want it that way either.
I’m afraid that as an educator that cost savings is simply not a good enough reason to advocate eliminating teachers in favor of C .
In the end, the short 10-30 minute teacher intervention, no matter how messy it may be, will become a centerpiece of networked education not something to be eliminated. I’d be thinking of how to use software to accentuate the teacher not eliminate her.
Michael,
I don’t think the purpose of tech should be to ‘accentuate the teacher’. The classroom shouldn’t be about the teacher. To my mind, the tech should be there to enhance the learning, which is pretty much why the teacher is there, too.
Nor am I totally on board with the ‘Humor, kindness, caring, concern, warmth, joy, anger, love ..’etc. It would be easy, for example, to add ‘control’, ‘lecture’, and ‘dominate’, etc. But more to the point, this suggests again that the teacher is the center of the world. Surely she is not the only source of these things in a room full of 16 kids! (If she is, then we have a serious probelem in our classrooms.) I’m not sure why we need to expose our kids to such an artificial environment for 8 hours a day to see basic human emotions.
If software could make the teaching of standard math more efficient, then I say, by all means, do it. With the time and money we all save, let he kids get out of the classroom and do some real learning.
I honestly believe that teachers need to fundamentally re-think our roles.
Ken Carroll
As long as you have students which are self-motivated and eager to learn, an approach like Chinesepod is perfect. But more often than not you need to teach material that does not meet unanimous enthusiasm of your students. But that is important anyway. Now what?
Here the role of the teacher comes into play. She or he needs to capture the students, to interact with them, and to guide them. Show the importance of the material and lay out a path. Make them look behind the curtains and discuss the resaoning behind the facts. Enable them to build up on your course after that stupid test is over. Sometimes you succeed in motivating them instantaneously, and sometimes it takes some time until they realize the importance of the content.
Some of the subjects I found most fascinating in University proved to be utterly useless later, while others, that I regarded to be boring those days, steadily gained in value over the years. And I still hear those professors voices, remember their habits, their approaches, their examples. It is personal.
For kids you have a total different ballgame. No way kids education can be handed over to programs ever. Not for my kids for sure.
Oh, and my best teachers in school or at the University were all exceeding in one discipline: enthusiasm. I sense the enthusiasm in the CPod recordings as well, but the limited richness of the medium is a restricting factor.
My wife still talks about her English teacher in China. She must have been truely outstanding in capturing her students.
Henning,
It’s really common for people in China to stay in touch with their teachers. This can last well into old age when you can’t tell the teacher from the student.
Ken
Ken,
She was an American who became some kind of missionary in China later. From what my wife tells you would like her methods - heavily focused on speaking, action, participation. Lots of variety. And highly enthusiastic. Obviously she left a life long deep impression.
The sort of teacher you cannot replace by softare or even podcasts.
Henning
Ahhh, the perennial discussion.
IMO, the classroom of today was instituted because it was a more efficient way to provide factory-style instruction to the young people of any country.
For a while the Bill Gates foundation was spending money on promoting smaller schools, until people started realizing that smaller schools often do not have the resources to provide the range of subjects and equipment and teachers that we consider important.
That being said, other people have pointed out that our current system ensures that young people spend inordinate amounts of time around other young people, whereas in former times they would have spent most of their teenage years around adults learning to become adults.
In addition, most of what I want to learn these days I can manage to learn by finding the materials I want on the web. However, I attend Chinese classes because I can get interaction with a native Chinese speaker. If there was a computer program available that could converse with me as well as a native Chinese speaker, there would be less need for me to attend classes …
I’d like to participate in this discussion too. I want to start by reviewing a study conducted in the U.S in 2004.
A scholar’s view:
Research by G. Roberts (2004) conducted with college students across the U.S aimed at asking ‘net generation’ learners’ definition for technology and their expectations about faculty members on this matter. Overall opinions suggest that university students want to have “knowledgeable faculty members with high technology customization in the classroom”. Roberts reports that for the ‘net generation’ technology is “what is new”, highlighting the fact that “the time between the new and the old can be quiet brief when viewed from a perspective other than the net’s generation”.
For learners expectations on the use of technology in the classroom Roberts (2004) asked the participants of his study to rank the importance of 1. professor experience and expertise 2. the professor’s skill to customize and 3. professor’s ability to make use of software. Robert’s results suggest that the first option had the most significant result, though the second and third options were having slightly the same results.
In brif, the results suggest that learners’ expectations include knowledgeable professors and use of tech in the classroom. Robert concludes his report by saying that
1. Tech definition is extensive, going from “computers to devices to meet learners’ needs”.
2. Customization is of paramount importance.
3. Learners recognize the value of making use of tools such as PowerPoint slides.
4. Learners feel frustrated when faculty members –let’s say- just cut and paste info. in the slides and do not interact in other ways with technology and very important for this discussion…
5. Roberts also concludes that there has been a failure to fully engage technology in the classroom.
Note:
Expectations of these surveyed ‘net generation’ learners did not include replacing the faculty member
For reading the document http://www.educause.edu/Techno.....ation/6056
My brainstorming
No teacher can deny there has been a gap between tech advancement and tech advancement inclusion in the classroom, neither can we deny that for many years learners were considered –and perhaps in many places still- ‘bottles to be filled’ with knowledge, and such knowledge mostly coming from the teacher. No doubt such a perspective has also changed with the results from research in education and new trends, new tech advances and easy access to information from different sources. Of course many teachers now considerer learners as dialectic beings, people with previous knowledge, different backgrounds, self-directed agents that bring their ideas to enrich the learning processes, and many teacher make use of tech, of course. The way I see it, the discussion about ‘can software replace teachers’ may lead to other questions such as do people want to replace teachers by software? Will be software able –or is it already able- to tell when to use certain expressions in real life conversation? Software already can do a lot of stuff but I don’t think software can replace a dialectic relationship, or motivate you and this is something teachers can do, of course I agree when Ken when he says we should re-think our roles.