Students assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on “machine-guided learning” software — with reduced face time with instructors — did just as well, in less time, as their counterparts in traditional, instructor-centric versions of the courses.
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Report: Robots stack up to human professors in teaching Intro Stats | Inside Higher Ed. Extremely unsurprising: statistics, like much technical material, is a practice. You learn it in the lab not in the lecture. As long as there’s motivation (a/k/a testing and grading), access to computers, and a good textbook, instructors are necessary only for clarification. That experiment should have had “textbook only” as a third condition. But there’s always the lure of technology. |
