Up for consideration by the board of regents is the issue of eliminating seat time as a requirement for a student to receive credit in a class. You don't need to be an genius to know that students who could not meet standards state standards with a teacher in the classroom will not be able to meet the standards without a teacher in the classroom. So why is the board of regents really interested in eliminating the seat time requirement?
Replacing teachers with software is cheap and makes it look as though students are learning something even if the students take the same computerized test enough times to memorize the answers rather than learning concepts.
The less obvious answer is that it opens the door to companies peddling online courses in lieu of classroom instruction. One such company, k12.com, ($384 million in sales last year) is run by Andrew Tisch, brother-in-law to NY State Board of Regents Chair Merryl Tisch. Watch K12's stock when the helpful sister-in-law eliminates the seat time requirement next month.
Recently the city has promoted the use of value added scores to evaluate teachers. It will be interesting to see the value added score for each of these online classes.
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