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I think it is. But there are levels to learning and approaches that tech can take. Speaking as a Psychology of learning and Comp Sci graduate. For a long time we have had the capability to use student learning record data to recommend optimal questions to maximise student grades in a given subject(adaptive learning); we've known the best exercises and methods to apply this with, like quizzes/active recall (see Roediger & Karpicke, 2006) and increasingly, made interfaces that keep people in the zone. The problem is, such systems have 3 challenges compared to a human experienced tutor/small group teacher:*
- 1. It's not abstract. It can't identify misconceptions in your wrong answers like a human would and refocus new activities on these gaps. Doing this is very effective. I believe this is possible in the future, hence why I developed blurt mode, a learning exercise on my website Revision.ai which asks students to blurt content they have learned on a specific subject, rates their coverage and accuracy and most important identifies, clarifies and stores for future exercise content their knowledge gaps, by using AI tech to identify misconceptions in a way we could not do 4 years ago.
- 2. An app will never truly check up on you socially or with social expectations of appearing in real life like a tutor; it's never as urgent. Staying engaged for 6-7 hours rarely happens either unlike real life with it's physical location constraints (which also have a role in memory formation and retrieval)
- 3. The perfect app needs millions of student learning records that account for your specific experience and knowledge. This is not possible. While humans cannot do this either, intuition of teachers is lost with apps. *Small groups/tutors can provide customised, targeted and long-term feedback which you feel a sense of accountability for responding to according to the research from Bloom, and is largely responsible for why wealth correlates with education with higher attenuation at the top quartile than the differences between the bottom three quartiles - paying for private tutoring really is a cheat to achieving more on grades (and therefore more opportunities), although whether it improves intelligence, is debatable(nobody agrees what intelligence is really, beyond some early G factor work that personally I do not see as that valid). I think you should be careful using the word "personalized" too - one, it is a popsci buzz word, and two, and consider "adaptive" instead - they have different meanings in the psychology of learning and like I address above, the personal aspect are mostly confined to humans. |