The Acting Professor

When I taught Programming for Engineers at Northwestern in 2008, the textbook gave access to PowerPoint slides I could use to teach the class. Since C++ is not a specialty of mine, I tried using the slides for the course. It just felt wrong and lazy--it wasn't me teaching and the students were picking up on it. So I went back to teaching my own way and even though I would occasionally make a mistake (or two or ten), they were my mistakes and the class learned better with me.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a series on Courseware where it goes much further.

Romano’s instructor was using a courseware product from the publishing titan Cengage. In a departure from traditional supplementary class materials, like textbooks, many courseware tools offer the “soup to nuts” of an entire course: Not only the digital version of a textbook, but homework assignments and assessments that an instructor can select from a bank of premade options. Educational videos, slide presentations, and study flashcards. Auto-grading and performance-analytics capabilities.

It all made for an underwhelming, and often frustrating, learning experience. “There were never ways we could learn from the instructor,” said Romano, who double-majored in political science and environmental science. “It was just a really weird class.” 

At what point are lecturers just actors, reading the material and running the course on autopilot? Is this an advantage over pre-recorded online courses?

With AI perhaps you remove the instructor completely and a course just becomes a fancy computer game. Will the students learn? Will they want to?