Our new robot overlords

Since I regularly complain about the lack of randomised trials in education, I really have to mention a recent US study.  At six public universities in the US, introductory statistics students who consented were randomised between the usual sort of teaching by real live instructors or a format with one hour per week of face-to-face instruction augmented by independent computer-guided instruction.  Within each campus, the students were assessed in the same way regardless of their instruction method, and across all campuses they also took a standardised test of statistics competence.   Statistics is a good target for this sort of experiment, because it is a widely required course, and the median introductory statistics course is not very good.

The results were interesting.  The students using the hybrid computer-guided approach found the course less interesting than those with live instructors, but their performance in the course and in the standardised tests was the same.   If you ignore the cost of developing the software (which in this case already existed), the computer-guided approach would allow more students to be taught by the same number of instructors, saving money in the long run.

This doesn’t mean instructors are obsolete — people like face-to-face classes, and we do actually care if students end up interested in statistics –but it does mean that we need to think about the most efficient ways to use class contact time.  There’s an old joke about lectures as a method of transferring information from the lecturer’s notes into the students’ notebooks without it passing through the brains of either.  We’ve got the internet for that, now.