Could teachers be replaced with robots?

[noblegiraffe]

This is increasingly being suggested as a solution to the critical lack of teachers, particularly at secondary school.

My general position is that we saw how pupils are not motivated to learn when left to their own devices at home over lockdown. As a teacher, a lot of my day is spent getting kids to do the work, in various ways.

This blog by Becky Allen "Will students feel motivated to work for the AI-masters?' is an interesting discussion of the issue. It refers to Animal Crossing making you feel guilty for neglecting your characters, the Duolingo owl encouraging you to keep a streak and so on. Personally, I find closing the rings on my Apple Watch the only thing that has motivated me to do regular exercise.

But what these things all have in common is that they are things that the student has opted into in the first place. Presumably there was some initial motivation on their part that just needs a nudge to keep going.

An important part of teaching is building relationships with the pupils on a human level. Can a student build a relationship with an AI? Well, definitely. But on a widespread enough scale for it to be more effective than humans interaction? Not sure.

However, would it be better than no teacher? Most likely.

https://rebeccaallen.co.uk/2024/01/13/artificial-incentives-will-students-feel-motivated-to-work-for-their-ai-masters/

I do think teacher will be removed from the classrooms eventually.

Motivated bright older pupils might do ‘ok’ with being plugged into a computer, but in general, I can’t see an effective alternative to a teacher in charge of 30 pupils, with the outcome being that they remain in the room, are safe, get on, (mostly!) listen and learn to a reasonable degree.

Even if you decide that this should just be cheap childcare to enable parents to work, no government would let them not be places of education.

Different experience than mine. The pupils I work with love Sparx. They all work at their own pace without being aware of where they rank in the class except in terms of effort. So there can be kids working on GCSE problems while others learn number bonds and most learn Pythagoras.
They intensely dislike Oak Academy science videos which are beautifully put together by real teachers. They will ask to do Tassomai (interactive science programme) instead. Their favourite thing is to have a real live teacher who they trust, who personally reads and rates their work. But they prefer Sparx or Tassomai to a teacher whom they mistrust, or to an Oak video.
Interestingly, they most dislike the one piece of English vocabulary software that has subject-specific errors.
There will always have to beadults in the room, and there are already robots teaching science and maths. That's what Sparx and Tassomai are.

I got my degree on line and it was great. For kids, it may work for gcse but younger children needs real teaching from teachers.