The title really should specify “to teach remotely”. And I think more broadly the context is the dream that widespread internet would make it easier to educate people “at scale” (meaning for less money per student).
So maybe the real question is why we ever expected “teaching at scale” to be effective.
I think that it’s quite clear that for an individual, curious student, the ability to use modern LLMs probably makes the ability to be 1-1 tutored (by a human!) cheaper/better. But I don’t think anyone claims that watching random videos on the internet will be as effective for LeBron James as having a personal trainer focused on him.
It seems like the overriding issue is to understand whether students need to take courses they’re not interested in. If the answer is yes, perhaps we need find ways of having these topics be taught by tutorial…
So maybe the real question is why we ever expected “teaching at scale” to be effective.
I think that it’s quite clear that for an individual, curious student, the ability to use modern LLMs probably makes the ability to be 1-1 tutored (by a human!) cheaper/better. But I don’t think anyone claims that watching random videos on the internet will be as effective for LeBron James as having a personal trainer focused on him.
It seems like the overriding issue is to understand whether students need to take courses they’re not interested in. If the answer is yes, perhaps we need find ways of having these topics be taught by tutorial…