Will Human Teachers Be Replaced by Technology and Computers?

As working and learning from home have become the norm, many of us have become familiar with intelligent tutoring systems.

This begs the question: Can technology like intelligent tutoring systems replace human teachers?

It’s unlikely!

Although incorporating intelligent tutoring systems into your learning platform can help to save time, provide personalised content, and promote self-learning, human teachers are irreplaceable.

Here’s why.

1. Human teachers are needed to create the curriculum

Some people think that human teachers can easily be replaced by AI tutoring systems due to the fact that the systems can function without human intervention.

However, human teachers are the ones who create the curriculum in the first place.

Without human teachers, the tutoring systems will not be programmed with the relevant syllabus to teach students.

Furthermore, human teachers are needed to either implement the new systems or teach learners how to best use the new system.

2. Skill-based classes are best taught by human teachers

Human teachers are best for skill-based courses such as arts, writing, and photo or video editing. When creativity, exploration, and artistic ability comes into play, human teachers are usually your best bet.

It is true that intelligent tutoring systems have teaching advantages over human teachers in some instances.

This is most applicable to content-based courses like mathematics because AI systems are able to record, remember, and learn different approaches and methods to solving problems. This means AI tutoring systems may be better at personalising the teaching methods based on students’ learning and working styles.

However, this may not be the case when questions and discussions come into play.

3. Computers do not understand emotions and context as well as human teachers

In the case of non-AI tutoring systems, learning buddies are usually only programmed with a fixed set of questions and answers. This means that they will pick out keywords from students’ questions without understanding context, and show answers related to the keywords.

While AI tutoring systems are more sophisticated and able to remember chat history and understand context, human teachers will often be able to quickly and accurately interpret students’ queries and provide the best possible answers.

In this current day and age, no technology is able to replicate human-like conversations as well as humans themselves.

The bottom-line

We think that technology and human teachers are best when used hand-in-hand. While technology and computers can help human teachers to save time and energy, human teachers are still vital to students’ learning journeys.

Rather than viewing AI as a replacement of human teachers, they should be viewed as a powerful tool that human teachers can use to improve classes, get more insights on students, relieve them of administrative work, and allow them to focus on helping students grow.

If you want to find out how AI tutoring systems can help your learning systems, you can contact Noodle Factory here.