Stephen Downes

This is quite a long post and it wanders into irrelevant territory quite a bit (for example, a debate on whether liberal or conservative instructors are better teachers) but the message, ultimately, is quite clear: "If universities continue to charge premium tuition for sub-par human instruction that is inferior to a $20/month AI subscription, the market will collapse." So what to do? "The only survival strategy is to offer what AI cannot: the 25% of 'heroic' teachers who provide mentorship, complex critique, and the human accountability that drives actual learning." This, however, requires definition and measurement of teaching quality, and the data for this just isn't there. Hollis Robbins isn't the first to stress teaching quality in higher education, but I still think the concept is more elusive than critics think. Because if it weren't, we'd have some was of measuring it, and if we could, then we'd just have AI optimize for that. As Justin Weinberg says, "calling for a metric that will reduce all the various things a university can do for students to a few numbers does not seem like a promising strategy."