Are Personalized Online Courses Our Future?

Will computers eventually take the place of high school teachers?

I am somewhat familiar with Apex Learning, a creator of educational computer programs that increases "access to high quality educational alternatives for all students through online learning."

Over the last few years many of my high school kept students from self-destructing, AKA, not graduating, by using APEX software (link here) and giving these kids a last chance chance to make up the missing credits. Two teachers oversaw twenty or so students that failed mandatory classes and needed credits to graduate. The units were made up on a pass/fail basis, and just about every student that needed this remedial work successfully completed it. None of these students were accepted to four-year colleges in the fall, but all of them received a high school diploma.

The APEX license is expensive, so my school can afford a limited amount of students that need remedial work.

APEX also provides learning programs for honors and AP classes, though my school has not used them. APEX describes its courses as a "digital curriculum — that comprises standards-based instructional content specifically developed for online delivery, with assessment opportunities integrated throughout, scaffolding to support learning for all students, and resources to support effective teaching." In other words, APEX provides "personalized learning."

Teachers make sure that students show up and are engaged in their work at the computers, but other than those exhortative and administrative functions, are teachers needed in the classroom? Right now the answer is yes, because the APEX and other online learning firms are too expensive to use for our entire school body.  In addition to incurring the fee for the license, the school would still incur the costs for hiring prison guards with whips (oops) teachers to keep the students on track, interact with parents, and do grading.

If costs were not a factor, does APEX and programs like it, educate children better than traditional methods? Are teachers going the way of the dodo bird and evolving into classroom policemen?

Esther Quintero writes (in The Real “Trouble” With Technology, Online Education And Learning),

personalized learning uses technology to adapt the presentation of content to students’ strength and weaknesses, as indicated by their prior responses to the material. The basic premise is that, when software is able to gauge a student’s level and adjust subsequent material to his/her pace and style of learning, the result is a more effective and higher quality learning experience.

However, personalized learning may not challenge students in unexpected ways. Quintero continues:

More fundamentally, learning occurs, at least in part, when unexpected things push us out of our comfort zone. Somewhere I read that the purpose of education is to give people the opportunity to learn something they ordinarily wouldn’t. There is a missing ingredient in most models of personalized learning: basically, the natural entropy that characterizes human experience. After all, let’s not forget that adaptive learning is based on the same technology that is used to generate automatic movie and music recommendations – and most of us would agree that that these have their limitations.

I have convinced many students to examine new ideas when they didn't have enough intellectual curiosity or confidence to  tackle them on their own. This may turn out to be my best and most human function in the classroom. Teachers are still necessary.

Update: October 6, 2012:  The New York Times takes a look at advances in computer tutoring, especially for math here. Annie Murphy Paul writes about the creator of ASSISTments, a computerized math tutor.

Computers excel in following a precise plan of instruction. A computer never gets impatient or annoyed. But it never gets excited or enthusiastic either. Nor can a computer guide a student through an open-ended exploration of literature or history....While a computer can emulate, and in some ways exceed, the abilities of a human teacher, it will not replace her. Rather, it’s the emerging hybrid of human and computer instruction — not either one alone — that may well transform education.