The Glaciers are Coming
When I’m not hacking on Javascript and PHP at Yourversion.com, I teach PHP and Ruby courses at CCSF and CSM. And next summer I’ll have a Python course at CSM (edited: jan 15, 2012 — and it was a great course). Up to now, these courses have been F2F—face to face. But now there’s trouble in River City.
Enrollment for F2F courses has been on the decline since the DotCom Bubble ruptured. Now consider this fact: enrollment jumps 50 to 100% when we put a course online. This means that we’re gonna put lots of courses on line—as many as courses as we can, as fast as we can.
Not everyone is happy with this. There are some teachers who despise online courses. The Luddites are yelling, The sky is falling! Online courses can’t be monitored. Online courese are an invitation to cheating! Robots will take our jobs!
The Luddites are probably right: the sky is falling. And the robots are coming. It’s inevitable that many teachers will be replaced by software that will be indistinguishable from a human teacher, online, at least. A friend who works at Adultfriendfinder.com tells me they already have bots that can convince eager young fellows that they’re talking to a really hot and willing girl. It wouldn’t take much more to create a bot that does a pretty good impression of an online Computer Science teacher.
Then again, it won’t matter, really. After all, the glaciers are going to be passing over this neighborhood in 50,000 years or so. As far as I know, there are no schools—or people—under 2,000 feet of ice. I know this to be true, because I read it online, on the Discovery Channel web site.