Hey, speaking of English teachers, Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun has some interesting things to say about how grading is done for online coursework:
A grader for a computer program is called a compiler. It’s either right or wrong and there are computer programs that can help you. And even there it’s not completely trivial. If you want to prove a theorem, it’s not entirely obvious how to assess a theorem, but by and large it’s easy. Compare this to critical dialogue in philosophy, discourse in philosophy. There, it’s really the subtlety of their language that makes all the difference and more—it’s not just about assessment, it’s not about grading, it’s also about feedback. When someone writes an essay, you want to give meaningful feedback so they can improve. I’ve seen good progress on the assessment of essays; I’ve seen almost no progress on qualified feedback. And that’s where you have a very simple opinion—you just have people do it. Our classes right now require essay writing, and those essays are being graded by people and it’s just fine, in my opinion. Why not? There are a lot of unemployed people in this country. I don’t think it has to be all computerized.
So while the MOOC environment replaces the teacher and classroom environment, sometimes you still need a flesh-and-blood teacher to do the grading. A compiler can “grade” the composition of computer code, but you wouldn’t want something like Microsoft’s grammar checker to grade English compositions.
It’s interesting that the more highly valued STEM courses are easier to fully automate than liberal arts courses. So English teachers will be among the last to be automated out of a job. Of course, the requirement for a human in the loop will only make liberals arts courseware relatively more difficult and expensive to provide, meaning that there will be fewer such offerings, and that they will be more expensive.
Advantage: STEM courses
[Photo by Jiuguang Wang.]
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