The future will involve a drastically reduced role for full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty who teach face to face.
As a researcher who specializes in educational technology, I see three trends that will further shrink the role of traditional college professors, noted In my 2021 book “Human Specialization in Design and Technology: The Current Wave for Learning, Culture, Industry and Beyond.”
College instruction often works well with online learning tools, so logic would seem to support this headline. K-12 however, involves more of a blended reality where human to human in person contact occurs in physical space. We don’t as yet know what proportions the blended approach should take, for children and teens.
Since the early 2000s speculation and research have been ongoing as to what changes the advances in Ed Tech might bring. That’s been “covered” here at PSA since 2008. We learned that there are so very many components to Ed Tech, and that they advance in conjunction at times… but also separately on their own at their own pace.
Which is to say, it’s basically impossible to report on Ed Tech progress as a generality that applies across the board.
Needless to say, this has promoted a great deal of confusion for those trying to anticipate trends, such as educational institutions, who aren’t sure what to purchase, or feature for their students.
The pandemic has further emphasized a NO one size fits all reality, while also bringing funding focus to Ed Tech cloud tools and immersive AR/ VR as well as a much greater emphasis on adequate broadband access.
Such speculation and research on future Ed Tech continues wandering in circuitous paths, with some forward direction as exponential trends take hold. One trend noted in the story below, is the use of AI to handle a lot of the logistics of teaching, such as course record keeping, which takes some burdens of teachers and admin, but only indirectly has any effects on “learning”,
One AI capability that would have huge impacts on learning is “just in time” learning modules, adapted in real time to all the inputs we can gather about a specific student, such as learning styles, and where they are at in their learning journey with a certain curricula.
But equally as valuable would be understanding real time emotional and physical states for a student, such as attention and positive “can do” demeanors, or lack thereof. Teachers, if class size is small enough, can monitor those important factors for learning in real time in a physical classroom.
But teachers are limited to what they might be able to do to address the specific states of students in real time. Whereas powerful AI cloud based learning tools may eventually have much greater assessment capabilities, tied into a vast array of possibly appropriate learning tools for that specific student in that specific moment.
(some car self driving software has the ability to analyze the alertness level of the driver by facial recognition techniques. Is the Driver looking anywhere but at the road?)
Efforts to gather and analyze real time data from students challenge our ability to safely store and “use” that data to support learning. As elsewhere, privacy and data aggregation are often placed in conflict, rather than in cooperation. It is hoped solutions for that can be found, and any regulations supporting that goal can be enforced.
Kudos to Gary for the link.
Future of college will involve fewer professors