The days of isolated classrooms are gone. The world’s scientists are compiling everything they know on Earth’s 1.8 million species into a free web site.
www.eschoolnews.com/news/PFshowstory.cfm?ArticleID=7077 [1]
For a few tens of $millions up front cost, the world’s 1.5 billion K-12 students will have 300 million pages at their fingertips. The critical issue is how will K-12 education deliver real learning and student motivation gains with a million times more information compare to the legacy 300 page book?
April 4th, 2007 Education Week http://www.edweek.org/ew/index.html [2] may have the answer. The new breed of artificial intelligence digital tutors are yielding learning gains of half to a full grade letter improvement. One example is Cognitive Tutor from researches at Carnegie-Melon http://www.carnegielearning.com/ [3] with 500,000 student users at 1300 schools. Auto Tutor from Institute for Intelligent Systems http://fedex.memphis.edu/iis/ [4] has an interactive talking head tutor that teaches physics and computer literacyi [4].
AI tutors can now teach chemistry, physics, foreign languages, mathematics, reading, computer science and even grade essays. These one letter grade boosting tutors do not match the two letter grade increase of one adult tutor per student. But the cost ratio of $50,000 (full time teacher) to $50 (typical per student for AI Tutor) is fairly attractive.
In 1992 I observed a high school physics tutor at the simulation lab in NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston and an algebra tutor at the Brooks Air Force Base simulation training center in San Antonio. I was absolutely convinced that this innovation would quickly sweep into K-12 and immediately bump our kid’s academic achievement by a letter grade. I am still convinced but it looks like "quickly" will be approximately 20 years!
What does 300 million pages of Earth’s species and AI tutors have to do with each other. Massive new content is the anvil and AI tutors are the hammer that will forever change the way our students learn.
The question for us is: Will Arizona lead this transformationi [4] or will it continue to lag the rest of the nation? eSATSi [4] advocacy is only as good as your support.