Korean Job Discussion Forums

[roanoke]

This was in Time Magazine: robots are now teaching English in Korea. Has anyone seen one? There was a picture. The rest of the blurb read, "some experts believe they could replace all human teachers..." or something like that. Thoughts?

[RobertGR]

The only "experts" saying they may replace human teachers are the ones ripping off the government for them.

In their current incarnation they're really just glorified webcams.

They do illustrate the amount of xenophobia present in Korea. That business with the Caucasian image fronting for a Filipina is just racist (plus the Filipina doesn't sound like a white person).

[comm]

Eventually telepresence teaching (through "robots") will be much more common than actually flying someone to the other side of the planet to teach.

It's kind of silly to think that won't happen eventually. Though the trash that Korea just spent money on isn't going to cut it anytime soon.

[Smee]

We definitely need more threads about English-teaching robots.

[Morticae]

The robot is useless.

Teaching remotely, however, is not! We had some classes taught remotely in my high school, and that was a long time ago!

So there is a teacher somewhere in the world, with cameras on him. Then he has several monitors with different classes, and he can see everything that's going on. The classes have TV's and cameras so they can see him, the classes can see each other.

This was a common way of learning a foreign language at my high school. I don't know why it isn't used more often. What is the added benefit of the robot? Not much, it's a little "flashy" I guess, but certainly not worth the cost.

[jrwhite82]

[AsiaESLbound]

I vote yes on robots, but with Filipinos remotely operating them as is the case with the current robot teacher trial. Instead of expensive robots, a 2D and even 3D video system can be the robot. An expensive physical robot is useless when it's not used for physical work, computers are already, "soft," robots used for entertainment, business processes, and teaching. You wouldn't build an expensive robot to type numbers into a PC so it also wouldn't be practical for teaching as affordable computerized video systems can do that. Expensive physical robots are for doing physical work; not teaching and soft skilled based business processes only requiring talking and using computers.

Oddly, today 2 of my students told me about their Filipinos Skype teacher they spend 90 minutes a night with after spending 1 hour with their American Skype teachers in Montana. I discussed the robot teacher thing that hit the media all over the world and my co-teacher was obviously embarrassed when I mentioned it and said there is no such thing. She agreed robot teachers are bad, but said Filipinos are very kind and much nicer than any of the Westerners as well as being cheap and convenient to use. I explained tFilipinos only come off as being extra kind, because they are competing to get in the ESL game seeing new economic opportunities; not because they are better than us. I do agree they are cheaper, but Skyping and using robots is only good as a productive time filling supplement; not a replacement of English teachers. She said the government is exploring a fix to also allow highly qualified Filipino career teachers on E-2 visas, because they are cheaper and kinder than Westerners. I explained how Western companies already do this sort of outsourcing such as with telephone based customer service, accounting, and IT so it makes sense it's your next step with ESL and means the job market in all areas increasingly offer fewer opportunities and decreasing pay due to how technology is changing it.