text for display Ender's Test 20120210

Description & Invitation Ender's Test of Artificial Instruction
Ender's Test of Artificial Instruction: Is Your Course a Pizza? Who needs teachers?
In the context of growing pressure on faculty and other academic professionals
to adapt, recreate, etc. courses that have been entirely or mostly based on face-to-face interaction
and "traditional" teaching/learning resources into
"courses" that include more online activities or elements or resources.
The short story and book "Ender's Game" immerses us in a painful mix of the real and artificial in future education. "Ender's Test" will guide/measure development of artificial courses - as the Turing Test does for artificial intelligence. Help us identify essential course elements, how they're changing, and shape Ender's Test. [Apologies to Orson Scott Card, Alan Turing & their admirers.]
Invitations - 500 characters and Longer Version
Initial question and challenge
Question: What activities or features would convince a student who is taking a course that there is a human teacher in a meaningful role, even though the student cannot see/touch/smell the teacher? I.e., what are the characteristics of a "teacherless" course essential to convince the students who take it that they have a teacher? Who cares? Why does/doesn't this matter? For whom?
Challenge: Develop a new test, which I'm tentatively calling "Ender's Test" - a bit of a spoof/allusion to both Ender's Game and Turing Test.
The idea is to develop a test for determining whether an undergraduate course is being "taught" by a human or not.... Like the Turing Test for determining whether a device that is communicating with someone is a human or is an "artificial intelligence."
OBSERVATION AND REFOCUS
Observation: Happily, several discussions in which we attempted to develop a list of the activities, features, and a related test as described above, seemed unavoidably to accomplish this closely-related and unstated goal as well:
Identify activities/features/patterns/capabilities of a human teacher that are likely to engage students more actively and effectively in a course, and that are likely to be perceived as demonstrating why it is important for a human teacher to have a significant role in the course.
Refocus: Let's continue this exploration with a slightly different focus:
What kinds of courses can be improved by increasing the role of technology and simultaneously decreasing the role of teachers?
For which kinds of learners, teachers, purposes, institutions?.....
How could or should we develop methods (rubric?) for identifying courses that can benefit more/less from
increasing the role of technology and media AND SIMULTANEOUSLY
decreasing the role of human teachers and other academic professionals?
Let's begin with an even narrower focus within the above:
"The Caring Test for Artificial Instruction"
["The Lilly Test for Artificial Instruction"]
In what kinds of courses does caring NOT matter much?
In what kinds of courses does caring matter a lot?
In what kinds of courses does caring matter a lot AND those courses can be improved by increasing the role of technology and simultaneously decreasing the role of teachers?
For which kinds of learners, teachers, purposes, institutions?.....
In what kinds of courses does caring matter little enough so that those courses can comfortably be improved by increasing the role of technology and simultaneously decreasing the role of teachers?
[Above, "what kinds of courses" is intended to imply also "for which kinds of learners, teachers, purposes, institutions?....."]
The WGU Test for Artificial Instruction
[With apologies to those who support the more recently responsible and effective work of the Western Governors University - as opposed to the claims that preceded and accompanied its launch]
Categories for Re-Clothing the Emperor(s) (or governors)
Instead of focusing on how technology can be used undetectably in courses to replace teachers, let's explore how we might sort courses in which increasing usage of technology to some extent replaces the role of teachers and other academic professionals (and family members? et al.?) into categories like these:
A. Not good enough for any children
B. Good enough for other people's children
C. Good enough for my children
D. Good enough for, and deserved, by all children

Steven W. Gilbert, President
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