2012-05-25

Will teaching soon be over?

MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) are sprouting up all over the Internet. While this seems like a good thing, since education becomes much more accessible, it's a double-edged sword, because it will have a great impact on society, and, inevitably, some people will have to find other jobs. Let me explain how that could happen.
So far, these courses seem very inoffensive, but sooner or later, some of them will become better and better recognized around industry. Also, they are very cheap to produce: new content only needs to be created once, or when the scientific understanding of reality changes. A lot of the same material can be re-used lots of times and can be broadcast for an ever-decreasing cost (think of cloud services, such as YouTube or Amazon's EC2).
This content also allows much greater interactivity - you can pause and rewind a lecture to better understand it, and you might keep track of your progress in understanding each of the concepts presented in the courses - and receive exercises and examples tailored by a machine specifically for you. Contrast this to an academic course, where you need to listen in a linear fashion, and you can't rewind if you missed something - perhaps losing track of what is being taught.
There are still some obstacles to overcome, such as verifying the credentials of a user, or gaining credibility of the assessments/exams, but if the courses truly manage to teach the needed information - and some will almost certainly manage to do it - then these problems are trivial, in my opinion. Some people disagree, however.
So, if high-quality education is available online for free (or almost for free), then schools and universities become redundant. People are just as able to build careers as if they actually went to universities, which is bad news for the universities, since few people are going to want to go to them. Therefore, many teachers lose their jobs.
This is another example of technological unemployment. The teachers, people who have devoted their lives to teaching, might be forced to find other jobs. Even though teaching is a highly specialized and very tough job to get right, the demand will reduce drastically in the following years, like many menial disciplines that suffered the same fate due to automation.
Such phenomena are actually indicators of progress. There can be no improvement without change, and  this can be seen as society taking off a band-aid.

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