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http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i28/28a03201.htm
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Monday, March 7, 2005
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Courseware That Could Replace Professors Is Inevitable, New York College Official Says
Chronicle of Higher Education
Right now an enterprising computer programmer somewhere is probably designing instructional software that could completely eliminate professors as we know them, says John C. Miller, director of the Algebra Courseware Project at the City College, part of the City University of New York.
Mr. Miller delivered that threat -- or promise, if you're an administrator rather than an instructor -- on Sunday at Innovations 2005, the annual conference of the League for Innovation in the Community College, which is being held here through Wednesday.
His best guess is that the programmer is probably in India, home to what Mr. Miller said are the world's best computer programmers and the world's best technical university, the Indian Institute of Technology.
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.
"The technology is ready," Mr. Miller said. "It's a question of when, not if."
Community colleges have in recent years adopted instructional software widely, mostly in developmental English, reading, and math courses, but the software now available commercially is supplemental. In most cases, an instructor still guides students through the course and answers questions that software cannot.
Mr. Miller said this approach isn't necessarily the best in every situation. For example, he said, the process by which community-college students are placed in sequential math courses is flawed. If tests place a student in the first course in a sequence, he may nevertheless be familiar with the first third of the course material, which could lead to boredom and bad study habits, which might set him up for failure when the instructor finally gets to the material that the student doesn't know.
If the student was taking a course that used self-paced instructional software -- which would allow him to breeze through the first third of the curriculum by proving to the software that he already knew the content -- he would have a better chance of staying engaged.
"It's clear to me there's a strong argument for computer-based instruction in sequential math," said Mr. Miller, a retired professor, "because it's nearly impossible for a professor to design an instructional pace that suits all students." Mr. Miller said that math would likely be the harbinger of such technology. "But if it works," he said, "expect to see it spread across the humanities."
Many professors who attended the session were doubtful.
Nasrin Shafai, an associate professor of math at Montgomery College in Conroe, Tex., argued that such software is more of a threat to advanced, graduate-level courses because more can be assumed of students in those courses.
"My students need me," she said. "They need me to motivate them. A computer can't do that."
Others pointed out that software publishers would be most interested in basic-level courses that pack in the students, rather than obscure graduate courses.
"Adoption may be irresistible," Mr. Miller said.