Not everyone who teaches is a teacher — the problem with robot tutors

The robots are coming with the plan to have AI robotic tutors in 23,000 schools, but will this technology stand up to the rigors of a South African classroom and will it reduce the gap between the haves and have-nots?

Oscar Koopman is the Acting Dean and an Associate Professor in curriculum studies in the Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University.

I recently spent two days in a stakeholder engagement on the draft of the new Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualification, the policy that will shape how our universities prepare teachers for years to come. Around the table were representatives from public and private universities, teacher unions, the Department of Higher Education and Training, the Department of Basic Education, the Council on Higher Education, the South African Council for Educators, the Joint Education Trust and members of the Education Deans Forum, among others.

For two days we worked through the draft, asking what should be included, what should be excluded, and what it had failed to anticipate. Each stakeholder made their case and perceived it as serious and necessary work. Yet, towards the end of the second day, in the closing discussion, someone made a statement that has stayed with me: “Not everyone who teaches is a teacher.”

The statement arrived at a crucial moment, because our country is about to test its truth on a national scale. The same policy must now prepare teachers for schools in which artificial intelligence is already present, and in which something more dramatic is beginning to arrive.

Universities have spent the past few years struggling to understand what AI means for teaching, learning and assessment. Our first response was largely to police its use by applying plagiarism-detection software, surveillance tools and attempts to distinguish the student’s work from AI tools. When these measures failed to resolve the deeper problem, many universities quietly settled into the position that students will use AI anyway, so perhaps we should simply learn to live with it.

And now, into this unresolved confusion, comes the next development: humanoid robots are beginning to enter South African classrooms as tutors. The question, then, is no longer simply whether robots can teach. It is whether teaching, by itself, is what makes someone – or something – a teacher.

I am no longer sure we know what good teaching is, or even what makes a good teacher. And if we have forgotten that, we are in no position to decide what a robot should replace. Let me turn to the robots, because they are real, and they are coming. South Africa has opened a factory in Durban to manufacture a humanoid AI tutor called IRIS , created by former teacher Thando Gumede. IRIS can teach across subjects from Grade R to tertiary level in all 11 official languages, offering personalised lessons and instant feedback. The stated ambition is to place one in each of the country’s roughly 23,000 schools.

I want to be careful and fair here, because it would be easy and wrong to sneer at this.