Eric Foner has better things to do with his time.

I guess this counts as a follow-up post to the one I wrote Friday on trusting textbook publishers with content. I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System. All teachers should read it, and all parents of school age children would be better off if they did.

Here’s what she has to say about textbooks (p. 237):

“Sit down and read a textbook in any subject. Read the bring, abbreviated pap in the history textbooks that reduces stirring events, colorful personalities, and riveting controversies to a dull page or a few leaden paragraphs. Read the literature textbooks with their heavy overlay of pedagogical jargon and their meager representation of any significant literature. Note that nearly half the content of these bulky, expensive books consists of glitzy graphics or blank space. Challenge yourself to read what your children are forced to endure.

If you think higher ed textbooks are any better, you’re obviously very good at fooling yourself. I have trouble making it all the way through even the good U.S. history survey textbooks, like Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty!. After a few years of jumping around, I realized that my problem was with textbooks by definition and decided not to assign one at all.

Jim Loewen’s work on American history textbooks laid the groundwork for that decision on my part. A few years ago he went back and re-reviewed the nation’s leading textbooks for the second edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me and they were all pretty much the same disasters they were when the first edition came out during the mid-1990s.

The reason for that is the growth of the textbook publishing-industrial complex: An army of poorly-paid writers who are popping out new editions of your textbook every year or two whether you actually need a new edition or not. You didn’t actually think Foner wrote Give Me Liberty! all by himself, did you? I’m sure he demanded complete oversight the first time through, but Eric Foner has better things to do with his time than decide where to put the social network in the new iPad version of his text.

The further down you go the commercial publishing food chain, the worse things inevitably get. A few months ago, I got asked to review a textbook that was absolutely the worst thing I had ever read. It was badly written and full of errors. I told the publisher’s rep that the person who wrote it had no business writing history let alone teaching it. It turned out that the publisher was an online university that I didn’t recognize by name. This “textbook” was a scheme to make money from their students both coming and going. The author of the book was already teaching for them. I wonder if he even gets to keep any of the royalties.

Are these the people you want to trust with your electronic content? Are these the people you want to trust making any content decisions at all?

In theory, Eric Foner should have no trouble assigning the textbook that bears his name. You, on the other hand, should be able to pick content that matches closely with what you teach already so that it can work with you rather than against you. If any content provider can wall off their garden and keep you from getting whatever text you want because it’s not available through their learning management system then I say stop teaching with a learning management system entirely, or at least don’t use it to deliver your historical content. Teaching the history you love makes it easier for you to show enthusiasm for the subject, which then hopefully rubs off on your students.

Is teaching online worth risking that arrangement?

What if I don’t want to teach out of your e-textbook?

For those of you joining this blog relatively recently, you should know that it has not always been devoted to the subject of educational technology. It was probably about six months ago that I was approached about teaching online, and I decided to take a good long look at what that would entail. While trying to figure out whether this kind of instruction was good for me, I began to wonder how this kind of instruction could be good for anybody, particularly students. That’s when I started sharing what I found out in this space since I figured most professors in a similar position to mine probably knew as little as I did about how online education actually works.

Since I have not actually taught online, I am at something of a disadvantage when describing the pitfalls of that experience. Nevertheless, you can learn a lot just by reading closely, and I’m lucky that I know a few people now who can help me make sure I’ve got my facts straight about this subject.

After reading this exchange between the representatives of two edtech companies, I started thinking about the process of assigning textbooks in online classes. Yes, universities can afford a lot of shiny toys if they can manage to hold classes without professors, but it seems that e-learning providers can still make a pretty penny if they can break into the textbook market too. Otherwise, edtech companies wouldn’t be fighting about it.

What if professors want to assign free e-books instead of Pearson’s content?, asks Pearson competitor Nixty. My question is what if professors don’t want to assign anyone’s e-books? What if professors don’t want to assign any textbook at all?

Never having taught an online class myself, I had to check with MfD to make sure that I understood the current state of textbooks in online education accurately. She basically described it for me this way: Some professors gobble up the one-size-fits-all packages that e-content providers offer because it makes their lives easier. Other professors use the LMS as a platform for discussion, and tend to choose their own texts. At the same time, a lot of institutions are moving towards fully online courses which would include textbooks, I suspect because of the efficiency of it all. That appears to be Pearson’s business model with OpenClass.

As I’ve explained before here, my department chairman once tried to get me fired because I didn’t want to assign the same textbook that he did. Therefore, I’m fairly ferocious about protecting that prerogative. But this is about more than just being able to decide what textbook you want to use. This about whether the books that I want to teach would be available at all in an online environment.

Some of us don’t teach out of survey textbooks anymore. I do fine building my own web pages and linking to my assigned reading. Others use WordPress. A pre-packaged online environment is a threat to that prerogative.

But what about upper-level history classes? They absolutely depend upon the depth and breadth of previous scholarship in order to inform students of specific knowledge that fits the subject of the course. I tend to switch most of my books every time I teach something above survey level. Would I be able to get all of them through OpenClass or any other LMS? Do most of the smaller university presses even offer e-books yet? My publisher is offering some current titles (like mine) that way, but not the backlist.

Even more fundamentally, are e-books always a good way to consume academic monographs? Would students even want to read David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage (a monster of a book my grad students are slogging through now) while sitting at their computer screens? It wouldn’t be very efficient to ship that tome to Afghanistan (which is where they told me many of the soldiers I would have been teaching would be stationed) if I were trying to teach students located there. Would I be pressured to teach something else?

It’s not just an academic freedom thing. Picking new books and documents each semester is a large part of what keeps my job interesting to me. I don’t want it to be standardized for efficiency’s sake because the inefficiency of it all is what makes it fun. Every day of every semester is different this way. You can’t say that if you’re working on an assembly line.

I don’t expect people who plan to make money off disrupting education to care about these concerns, but I do expect that other humanists would. What say you other humanists?

Why edtech is a labor issue.

I still don’t feel like directly discussing that awful Harvard “Facebook in the classroom” article, but I will mention that the response to it that I liked the best came from Worst Professor Ever, who noted:

I know it seems cool to “disrupt” education if you’ve never had to stand up there and teach. But if you have, I think you can appreciate the irony of computer use being “disruptive” not in the newfangled positive sense of the word but in the old-fashioned sense, as in, not enabling good teaching to happen at all.

The explanation for that seemingly bizarre observation is pretty simple when you think about it: those who want to disrupt education aren’t really interested in educating anyone. They’re just interested in making money from education. Last time I checked, the monetary position of education at all levels worldwide wasn’t all that great. Where then, you may ask, do these people expect schools to find the money that they aim to make?

My answer to that question would be labor cost savings.

Coincidentally, I’ve been re-rereading Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works (start with the blog) to help me put all this into perspective. What Bousquet reminds me is that my concerns about the employment implications of educational technology are hardly original. They are also, if you remember that administrators are also managers, easily understandable.

“Technology,” Bousquet writes on p. 58 (and remember the book was published all the way back in 2008):

“fuels…an academic-capitalist fantasy of unlimited accumulation, dollars for credits nearly unmediated by faculty labor…This is really a version of one of the oldest fantasies in industrial history, the fantasy of profit without workers. If only the investor could build an entirely mechanized factory! With the push of a button, cars and snowboards and washing machines would come out the other end! The same dream animates academic management: with a mechanized higher ed, a line of tuition payers could be run through automated courses that provide them with the “necessary information,” and out the other end would emerge nurses! engineers! sports psychologists!”

If you doubt that administrators are more interested in saving money than the quality of education, Bousquet explains (p. 204) where adjuncts come from:

“Under the current system of academic work, the university clearly does not prefer the best or most experienced teachers; it prefers the cheapest teachers.”

Back in the day, Bousquet was (I wonder if he still is?) convinced that universities will keep a small cadre of tenured professors around to display in their promotional materials. He writes (p. 83):

“As education is stripped down to the provision of information in a larger market share, price competition in that sector intensifies and the rate of profit plummets.“

A few full-time Ph.D.s, in other words, can separate state universities from Trump University. However, if education technology means that all the professor has to do is run a computer program, the need for Ph.D.s in just about everything will dry up. Keeping those figurehead professors around for show will seem pretty expensive pretty fast.

What can we do about this? That’s easy! Don’t let education get stripped down to being just the provision of information. It’s a no-brainer that technology can impart specific information to students more “efficiently” than professors can, so competing on their terms would be like tilting at windmills. Instead, professors have to change the terms of the debate.

I’ve covered some of this before: Teach skills, not facts. Lose the multiple choice tests. Kill all the textbooks – not so that we can replace them with edu-tainment, but so we can teach using the 21st century tools that help us do our jobs better, not render our services obsolete.

But once you understand that there’s an entire system designed to degrade the conditions under which you work, you can do more. You can work to combat the conditions which that system depends upon. Technology that makes our lives easier is at best a band-aid and at worst the instrument of our own demise when there’s a class struggle going on out there.

Letting the inmates run the asylum.

If students checking Facebook in class is the fault of their boring professors, why on earth would anybody want to assign textbooks embedded with a social media network? After all, unless you’re reading long passages from your textbook at the front of your class (behavior I hope that nobody reading this condones) aren’t the textbooks inevitably going to be a lot more boring than we are?

PS The inmates referred to in the title of this post aren’t the students, it’s the arms merchants.

Don’t ask, don’t tell: Online education edition.

As I promised on Saturday, this post takes up the second of the “Myths of Online Education” as outlined in this IHE article from Friday. Here’s what one member of a panel of edtech experts assembled in Philadelphia last week had to say about cheating in online classes:

Does online education enable cheating?

Philip D. Long, a professor of innovation in educational technology at the University of Queensland, in Australia, suggested many issues that endanger the integrity of online learning, such as assessing individual contributions to group projects, are not unique to online education.
Issues that are, such as identity authentication and proctoring, stand to become less salient as technology such as Proctor U — a technology that allows universities to monitor test-taking students via Webcam — becomes standard.

I’ve encountered the first part of this answer before. To me, it’s the functional equivalent of placing your hands over your ears and humming loudly. Just because cheating occurs in face-to-face classes does not mean that giving people greater opportunities to cheat in online classes is somehow OK. The direct supervision inherent in a face-to-face education is a natural impediment to cheating. It’s human nature to expect more students to take advantage of the opportunities to cheat that online education gives them which they wouldn’t have otherwise. Excusing this because other kinds of cheating occur in face-to-face classes anyway is nothing but a cop-out.

I’ve heard the webcam part of the response to the cheating issue before too. My original problem with that answer was the obvious 1984 implications of cameras everywhere. Yet there’s something about the wording of that particular answer which has led me to an epiphany that may be even worse than that first concern: Who exactly is watching the feed of all these online students taking tests?

Is there a master screen through which the instructor can observe all of their charges taking the exam at once? I doubt it. In fact, if the class is given asynchronously, watching them all at the same time is impossible. Does the instructor go back and check to see if any of their students cheated while taking the test? Do you realize what a time suck that would be? Or are they expecting the students who cheat to turn themselves in?

Since it’s the appearance of propriety that matters most to the online education industry, not actual propriety itself, I’m guessing that these web cams are unmonitored. Setting up a police state is extraordinarily expensive, yet the purpose of the online education industry is to save money. Something’s gotta give, and I’ll bet you anything it’s not the money.

At the end of the day then, both these responses – the “two wrongs make a right” argument of there will always be cheating and the 1984 solution – suggest a throwback to the early days of the Clinton Presidency: We won’t ask if you’re cheating, if you agree not to tell us. Colleges get tuition dollars. Students get good grades.

Who’s being hurt? Only the rest of higher education.

If technology is the answer, what exactly is the question?

Usually I shy away from writing about the last thing I read in Inside Higher Ed that made me angry because that’s just too easy a way to blog. This article from Friday, however, really is appalling on oh so many levels though. “Myths of Online Education” is the title and the subject is a panel at the Educause conference in Philadelphia last week.

Myth #1 is that teaching online is a giant time-suck for the professors who do it. “Poppycock!” says our panel of experts:

[George] Otte took aim at the question of online education being a time-suck for professors — a question that has prompted fears of faculty burnout. But the CUNY technologist suggested that this question does not adequately account for the cost, in time, of finding one’s footing on a new teaching platform.

“We may be confounding the time it takes to do something with the time it takes to learn to do something,” Otte said. The first time instructors teach online, they tend to overcompensate for their ignorance by over-investing their time in the virtual classroom. But that does not mean they will not adjust and adapt — just as most instructors did to the circumstance and demands of classroom teaching when they began their careers.

He’s right, of course. While it’s hard to master programs the first time you use them, everyone tends to get better at something the more they use it. For example, even though WordPress keeps changing the position of everything on its dashboard every few months, if you keep an open mind you’ll figure it all out.

Unfortunately, that’s not the real reason that online education is a gigantic time-suck, as an online instructor points out in the comments:

I teach online. I’m in the classroom almost every day and often on weekends. That’s part of the trade-off for not traveling to a classroom building and spending roughly 3 hours a week in a classroom. But all-in-all, teaching a class online requires more hours in total than teaching in a classroom. Gestures, etc. take less time than typing and editing classroom posts than simply talking in a face-to-face setting. Also, setting up the class is a front-loaded process and seems to take more time than just creating a syllabus.

Even if you read this article last week, you should go back and read the comments. They are so brutal that the panelists from the conference felt the need to chime in and start to walk back what they said while preaching to the choir. I guess the “myths of online education” don’t really look like myths where the rubber meets the road.

Take this one, for example:

My Dean increased the load for a hybrid online course (that’s a course that meets 1, 2, or 3 times with the rest of the course fully online) from 15 to 20 students this semester. Traditional courses have 30 students in our department. I have a few hybrid online courses of 20 students and this has caused the number of discussion groups to increase and my time to teach the course has risen dramatically as I try and provide feedback nearly weekly to each student. My workload has increased dramatically.

I get the impression that people who go into online teaching with the best of intentions tend to “adapt” by working less as their classes get scaled up by administrators who couldn’t care less how much feedback students get. Indeed, from what I can tell, the technology is being deliberately designed to do the teaching for you because that’s what makes the scaling up possible. What the academic technologists are trying to tell us in this article is, “Let the computer be your friend.” I can’t help but wonder though would you even need a friend if the people who hire you to teach online gave you the resources you need to do your job right?

After all, if you care about giving students individual attention the program you use cannot do that for you. That’s why I liked this comment a lot:

Written commentary on each student’s papers should explain to a student how his or her methods are in error, if necessary, or how the methods shown by a student are incomplete, insufficient or “well-developed”. In essence, an instructor must analyze the comprehensive fashion by which a student is communicating in written form the critical thinking used in solving a mathematical problem.

Moreover, there is no computer software that could possibly analyze the multiplicity of methods and variety of notation (in mathematics especially) that a student could use to demonstrate solutions to “critical thinking” type problems. Thus, most of an instructor’s activities CANNOT be replaced by “machines”.

Unless, of course, you don’t care that the machine is offering an inferior educational product which the online education industry will be happy to provide you with assuming you are willing to pay their price.

PS I’ll take up myth number two from this article on Monday morning: cheating.

Why professors so often run around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Three or four presidents of my university ago (they come and go so fast these days that I’ve lost count), I asked the man what percentage of courses on campus are taught by adjuncts. He said he didn’t know. At the time, I thought he was lying, but after reading Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters I’m going to have to revise that assessment. I’m now pretty sure that he just didn’t care.

On one level, Ginsberg’s book doesn’t tell a professor anything new. Obviously, the number of tenure-track faculty at American universities has shrunk significantly over time, while the number of administrators has skyrocketed, particularly those of the middling rank who Ginsburg repeatedly refers to as “deanlets.” These deanlets, by Ginsburg’s account, face a continual struggle to justify their overcompensated existence. Therefore, they make the lives of the remaining overburdened tenure-track professors interested in exercising their prerogatives with respect to teaching and shared governance substantially more difficult.

Although the book does not break new ground, it’s greatest strength is its thick description of the administrative mindset. Sometimes it reads like Clifford Geertz at a Balinese Cockfight. Clearly, it’s a whole ‘nother culture in administration. I used to wonder how some of these people manage to sleep at night, but the answer is really quite simple: administration, to most of them, is an end unto itself.

This is precisely why I’m so concerned about who gets to make technological choices on American campuses: professors or administrators. I don’t think this issue is getting the coverage it deserves in the ed-tech press. Take this question from the Chronicle‘s Wired Campus blog to a Pearson OpenClass honcho:

Will colleges be able to control how OpenClass is upgraded and whether to accept new features?

While they didn’t even think of adding the phrase “or professors” after the word “colleges” in that question, much to Pearson’s credit the answer to that question does include us in the equation. Unfortunately, plenty of administrators are ready to cut tenure track professors out of vital teaching decisions entirely.

You think I’m exaggerating? I Googled up this old Chronicle article after reading about it in Ginsberg’s book. It focuses on a reorganization plan proposed by the Chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents a few years ago:

Mr. Manning’s plan…would offer cut-rate tuition to undergraduates who agreed to take courses online “with no direct support from a faculty member.” The proposal calls for fulltime professors to assume an “oversight” role as the university employs more adjuncts and asks advanced students to start teaching beginning students. It says that, in general, the university system should consider “abandoning some of the ingrained structures that restrict our approach.”

On the one hand, you got to admire the guy for admitting that courses are worth more when faculty teach them. On the other hand, what exactly are these students going to learn without “direct faculty support?” Why don’t they just go the library, read a bunch of books and cut out paying tuition entirely?

This explains why that plan got nowhere. It also demonstrates the value of faculty input in academic decision-making of all kinds, technological and otherwise. Too bad those of us who are left are so stressed trying to do everything else that falls under our job description that we have no time to participate in these kinds of shared governance activities. But as Ginsberg suggests, there’s a deanlet out there somewhere who’d be more than happy to take that responsibility off your shoulders.

How do you skim an e-book?

I’ve been spending a lot of time this semester re-reading classics on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American history in order to improve the book manuscript that I have to submit in December. Yesterday, I decided it was time to pick up John Higham’s Strangers in the Land again, since my editor had said that my immigration chapter needs improvement. The copy in our library was checked out. Those at my university do, however, have access to an electronic version of the manuscript!

That’s wasn’t good enough for me because I want to browse it. My manuscript is already done. All I need to do is find the parts that Higham wrote that will be most relevant to me quickly and move on since I’ve got a lot of books to read before the deadline (and three courses to teach when not writing).

Higham’s chapter titles aren’t specific enough for me to find the relevant parts, and I don’t have any particular search terms in mind since I’m interested in juicy details I can add to the narrative rather than any particular subject. In an e-book, it would take me far too long to page through everything. I’m not sure the entire page would even fit on my computer screen.

Codexes (to steal yet another term from Historiann) seem to be taking a lot of flack these days. Some libraries are getting rid of them because of budget cuts. Some libraries are getting rid of them to make room for coffee bars. Amazon is trying to wean us off them so that they can control the universe. Yet sometimes a physical book is just what the doctor ordered since they’re easy to navigate when you’re not planning on reading every single word.

That’s why foregoing the e-book was a no-brainer. The real question was whether or not to recall Higham from whichever undergraduate has it. Since they’re probably doing their research paper for my America 1877-1945 course, and not wanting to undercut the quality of the research papers that I’ll eventually have to grade, I decided to get Higham’s book through interlibrary loan.

After all, waiting three days for a book is no great burden. People were doing it for decades before Kindles came along.

21st century child neglect.

Yeah, let’s pick on Rupert Murdoch again. In his education speech last Friday, Murdoch also said:

What technology can do is give teachers closer, more human and more rewarding interactions with their students.

So Jefferson was the Antichrist, democracy is fascism, black is white, night is day and computers facilitate “closer, more human” interactions? Education reform isn’t Fox News, Rupert. You can’t just make stuff up and assume people will believe you. Or maybe the problem here is that he can because nobody cares about the human toll created by the technological determinists’ misguided reform efforts.

A few weeks ago, one of my graduate students told me there’s such a thing as online Kindergarten. Upon hearing this I tweeted:

Just heard there's such a thing as online Kindergarten. That's not education, it's child neglect.—
Jonathan Rees (@jhrees) September 28, 2011

I actually used the word “neglect” very deliberately there. It’s not abuse to stick headphones on kids and ignore them for a little while. [That's why we got the minivan with the DVD player installed into the headrest of the front seat.] However, the more time kids spend listening and watching, the less time they get to interact with their peers and their teachers. Neglecting them a little is OK. Building a whole elementary school based on keeping them occupied this way is not. Even if there are no physical bruises, an entirely online education at such a young age will leave them socially stunted in the long run.*

So when Rupert Murdoch tells me that sitting in front of a computer will produce more meaningful interactions between teachers and their students, I’m left scratching my head. I thought a human relationship required two human beings to be part of it, not two humans and a computer. How exactly does slapping earphones onto a child make it possible for he or she to get to know their teacher better?

All that aside, I still think there are ways that technology can improve education; just not through the self-contained computer programs that Rupert wants to sell everyone. Among her many causes, UD has a category entitled “powerpoint pissoff,” which categorizes the many abuses of that particular technology. Many of those posts are stories of professors who fill their slides with text, read that text verbatim and use it to separate themselves from their inevitably bored students.

On the other hand, as I’ve written before, PowerPoint can also be a remarkably useful tool for bringing pictures into the classroom that would not be easy to bring in otherwise. Pictures, like video, when used right should be a way to bring students into historical analysis, not a way to shut them out. It’s through the ensuing discussions that students can really get to know their teachers and teachers can really get to know their students.

Too bad that’s not going to happen when all the kids in the world are strapped into headphones all day and every college student in America (who isn’t in the Ivy League) is watching videotaped lectures in their pajamas.

* Don’t get me started on home schooling. Just don’t.

Creative destruction is still destruction.

I’ve been reading the now-famous We Are the 99 Percent tumblr for some time now, and the thing I find most striking about it is the number of people who cite their student loan debt in their statements. It’s not like my education was either cheap or free, but the shear magnitude of the numbers cited really is quite striking, which makes their anger easily understandable.

Apparently, noted lunatic Glenn Beck would like these people to blame their own colleges and universities for this part of their economic predicament. As the Church Lady used to say, “Isn’t that convenient?” The earth has moved, the world has changed and Beck wants us to blame the institutions that prepare people for the world rather than the world itself. If college cost 25% of what it does now, there would still be a shortage of good jobs to go around.

Unfortunately, the edu-punks interested in changing education rather than blaming it are only going to make the unemployment problem worse before it ever gets better. You can see it in their rhetoric, which tends to invoke destruction (or at least disruption) rather than construction or cooperation. Here, of all people, is Rupert Murdoch, invoking what is perhaps the most famous ad of all time at Jeb Bush’s education summit last Friday:

We need to tear down an education system designed for the 19th century – and replace it with one that suited for the 21st. And we need to approach the education industry the way my friend Steve Jobs approached every industry.

Most of you know that Steve introduced the Mac with an ad that has since become a legend.

Those of you who were watching the 1984 Super Bowl will remember it.

It ran only once.

It ran for only one minute.

It shows a female athlete who is being chased by the police of some totalitarian regime.

At the climax, the woman rushes up to a large screen where Big Brother is giving a speech.

Just as he announces, “we shall prevail” she hurls her hammer through the screen.

With that, Big Brother’s whole world comes crashing down.

If you ask me what we need to do in education, I would point you to that ad.

Later in the speech, Murdoch claims that, “Technology is never going to replace teachers,” but that’s exactly the way it’s been playing out in American classrooms at all levels. Here’s the way it has played out at one Kindergarten:

On a recent visit to KIPP Empower, it was not clear that computers—or the educational games that the children play on them—were doing much teaching. Instead, Kerr says the computers provide a way to reduce his class size of 28 students. By having half work on laptops in the classroom, a teacher is able to work intensely with the other 14 students.

Or you could hire two teachers instead of one and every student could get that close attention all the time.

Here’s the same dynamic as it plays out in higher education. Or maybe you’d prefer here. I’ve got a practically limitless amount of evidence for this because the American example of technology in higher education is to use it not to improve education but to juice total revenue, which inevitably means decreasing labor costs rather than making tuition cheaper.

Yes, I know all about creative destruction (Schumpter’s version, not Marx’s). Surely technology in education can do wonderful and interesting things, but telling that to an unemployed ex-education major with $50,000 in student loan debt (or an adjunct faculty member in the same position for that matter) is the functional equivalent of releasing the hounds on them.

Labor needs to have the economic difficulties created by significant transitions cushioned in order to win their support. Teachers are not Microsoft or IBM. They’re mostly college graduates with lots of student loans that need to be paid back. Replacing teachers or professors with a software program isn’t going to help anyone involved, except the companies that manufacture those software programs, companies like the one now owned by Rupert Murdoch.