The Automation of Education: How Computers Will Take Over Most Teaching Jobs
Hatem M. Wasfy, Tamer M. Wasfy, Jeanne M. Peters, Riham Mahfouz · 2013
The cost of primary, secondary and higher education consumes large percentages of the incomes of families, states and even countries every year. In this paper, we describe how automation can not only greatly reduce the cost of education, but also create new learning paradigms that can increase the effectiveness of that education as compared to traditional classroom learning. Intelligent Tutoring Massively Open Online Courses (ITMOOCs) can seamlessly deliver entire curricula while ensuring that students achieve and maintain the required level of proficiency in every curriculum topic. This is achieved by organizing the curriculum into an ontology of interconnected topic nodes, and assessing the students’ performance after he/she covers every node. The Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) continuously adapts the course’s delivery to the needs of each student by skipping over topics that the student demonstrates proficiency in, and reviewing topics that are determined to be the cause of assessment failures in downstream course nodes. The ITS can also ensure that students maintain the required level of proficiency in the topics they have learned throughout their educational and professional careers by assigning an expiration time to each curriculum node after which it is reassessed. The system allows each student to set unique educational goals by selecting the individual topics that he/she ultimately wants to learn.