I have had the good fortune to have taught at multiple institutions. What I recall most was that to be effective a good professor needs to make a connection with the students, they must become one with the material being taught. That means I had to have eye contact with each student, I had to see if they were missing something.
I recalled from my High School days I took college chemistry on television via a program called Continental Classroom. Midway through the course they introduced the concept of a mole. I could only think of pigmented skin lesions. One I kind of got it I could not figure out what experiments would demonstrate it. It took me fifty years to come back to Einstein and Brownian motion, despite having written about it I never realized Einstein's paper allowed for the calculation of Avogadro's number. You see in 1959 one could not ask the TV professor and he obviously could not see me.
The NY Times discusses AI as a means to instruct. They note:
Sal Khan, the chief executive of Khan Academy, gave a rousing TED Talk last spring in which he predicted that A.I. chatbots would soon revolutionize education. “We’re at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Mr. Khan, whose nonprofit education group has provided online lessons for millions of students, declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”
Nonsense. We have tried this for a decade with online courses. The AI bot cannot see the student, cannot see the eyes showing lapses in understanding. The AI bot treats each student the same, when in reality they are all different.
This nonsensical proposal will just homogenize incompetence rather than provoke brilliance.
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