Robot teachers in S. Korea

This is quite interesting. S. Koreans are developing “robot teachers” to function as teaching assistants in public schools. Apparently they are working fairly well. A recent project showed that elementary school students working with these robots in an english class showed “better learning achievements in speaking, as well as greater confidence and motivation”. Nevertheless, the use of robots in education does raise some interesting questions, especially regarding the role of the [human] instructor and the classroom in education. It seems fairly clear that there are no ambitions to replace human teachers with robots, rather that the robots assist teachers in the classroom. But, what does that mean for the human teachers? Will they have more time to develop interesting and effective learning activities or will their extra time go into programming and controlling robots?
Education in S. Korea is in a very interesting predicament. Government expenditure on education is lower than the OECD average. Many parents rely on the “shadow” education system to make up for deficiencies in the public system, i.e. private tutoring for individual and groups of students. Shadow education can be very expensive and places considerable strain on families’ financial resources. The result is a very unequal system that advantages children of well-off families that can afford tutoring. Also, from the students’ perspective, most of their time ends up being spent either in school or attending tutoring sessions, leaving little time for social activities.
While robot teachers may address some problems in education, it’s questionable whether they will minimize the need for shadow tutoring. One wonders then whether it might be a better idea for S. Korean government to spend the money going into developing robots on making qualitative changes to their formal education system to effectively address the issue of shadow education.