“Life after MOOCs” (massive online open courses) insightfully reviews MAIT (a next leap in automated “cost-driven” education), which is much (much (much)) bigger than “common core.” MAIT includes countless “automated individualized assessment, interactivity, adaptability, and modularity” aspects.
Now, briefly, some old “copy/paste” education technologies: instructors’ chalk (stone) wrote on black slate (stone) boards; students used graphite/clay pencils on cellulose paper, but thought about what to copy; printed books transformed manual copying into manufactured products, so curricula became bibliographies; and 1960 brings programmed logic for automatic teaching operations (PLATO), a computerized pedagogical system interactively teaching numerous subjects and “including text overlaying graphics, contextual assessment of free text answers, depending on the inclusion of keywords, and feedback designed to respond to alternative answers” (very MAIT-like). So today, MOOCs on Internet media (with sort-of limitless memory, bandwidth, and computation space) hybridize into MAIT.
Awkwardly, what PLATO was to good old books, MAIT is to good old MOOCs, but books, MOOCs, and basic teaching problems remain. How do students learn layers of basic facts and skills while simultaneously thinking/exploring ideas, their proofs, refutations, transformations, convolutions, innovations, and substitutions? As a teacher, I see every student as a living combination of typical, special needs, and genius; each one has skills, disabilities, and unique insights. The teacher’s Wizard of Oz (MAIT) dilemma is discovering “the man behind the curtain”; educating “there is a box,” yet inspiring students to think “out of the box.” Thus, ambivalently (like the authors) expect “Life after (new PLATO box) MAIT.”