EPLT Online

I saw an interesting article today that made me stop and think.

Andrea Genevieve, on her Tech Academy blog, wrote a post about Virtual-TA, a product that is supposed to help university professors manage their courses. Titled “Virtual Teaching Assistants  Taking Technology Too Far?”, she writes

“I was expecting some sort of downloadable tool that would monitor student assignments or help manage grading etc. What I found was something very different.

After looking over the website and downloading a brochure, it was clear Virtual-TA is a service intended to replace the traditional Teaching Assistant.”

I’m not going to get into the virtues of this particular product, as it’s beyond the scope of this blog.  We generally don’t get involved in marketing/reviewing products unless it’s something that we’re using and have experience with.

However, I did want to get your thoughts on the broader subject matter.

The MET program, at least for teachers who take it, is mainly to help you incorporate technology into your teaching and the curriculum. Ostensibly, this would be geared to the actual act of teaching, not the “process” of teaching. However, what about that process?  Is there a point where technology is taking the place of the teacher rather than helping the teacher?

Andrea states:

“At first, this may seem like a novel idea: Let’s outsource assessment, automate grading and feedback on student assignments, turn around graded papers and assignments within days to student, or, save on costs by paying a rate for this service instead of paying a real person.”

She then goes on to talk about how this program is basically taking the place of a TA, and how valuable the TA experience is for the student, both financially as well as getting the teaching experience.

So there are two aspects to discuss:

1) Does technological teaching assistance reach the point where the instructor isn’t actually doing his/her job?  Sure, the teacher may do the lecturing, but if an actual person isn’t giving the students feedback, I would think that’s a failure of the teaching process.

2) Is it a good idea to replace a TA with some technological advance? Disregarding for the moment the financial aspect of this for the TA, isn’t it better for the future of our education system if interested university students are able to get some teaching experience by being a TA for an instructor?  This not only gives the TA a chance to learn under a skilled mentor, but it gives them classroom time (depending on what type of course it is, obviously) that they can use to sharpen their teaching abilities.  I remember fondly some of the TAs I had for science courses that had 200+ students in the lecture hall.  The TA was our human link to the material, though obviously our instructor was also available if we needed help.

What do you think?

Note: I am not commenting on the merits of the actual Virtual-TA program.  I have no experience with it, and have only read Andrea’s take on the program itself.  I intend only to discuss the broader issues that Andrea’s take on the program made me think about.

Edit #1 (7/28/10) I should make something clear about Andrea’s post, something that she makes clear on her blog but didn’t really come through on the excerpt I included here.  She has never used the Virtual TA product, but is basing her commentary on the product information.

Since I was moving beyond the product itself to a broader idea, I wasn’t careful enough in excerpting her comments.