Teacher's work has never been an easy one. There will always be slow students that always get on teachers nerves, and it is hard to devote attention to everyone. Good teachers often have no rest because of very high demand on their work, so they must go from one university to another, wasting precious lifetime. Every generation of teachers face with this problem, as well as with many others. Now, in the age of robotics and computers, people thought of many solutions to this. First, lectures were broadcasted via radio. It was the simplest solution, but the least effective. Students must see lecturer, see emotions on his face and see his gestures. Then, it was TV and projectors. Good methods, but the main thing in teaching is missing - to attract interest of audience, lector must interact with students, answer their questions and make every lecture special one. With help of TV, it is impossible to give that kind of interaction. Therefore, solution has already been found.
Computer scientists in Massey University, New Zealand developed a program that is a sort of virtual teacher. Not only it can teach, but it also can read your facial expressions and gestures and react to them! It can sympathize with you, listen to your problems and even change teaching style to match audience mood! This program is presented by a young virtual girl named Eve.
With help of cameras on top of each student's screen, it can look at students and make decisions, whether the audience is interested or not. Of course, it is in their power to sometimes give students some freedom and simulate a real teacher's behavior.
We do not know how this program will punish you for not doing your homework, but we are sure that it will be impossible to play dumb and say something like "dog ate my homework" to this kind of teacher. Maybe threatening it with deletion will help you to deal with Eve, other methods are unusable except for a virus remembering the computer origin of this "girl".
Of course, virtual teachers will never replace human ones. However, it can be very useful for the distant places, where it is hard for human teachers to reach besides one virtual teacher can teach several subjects. Who knows, maybe after 10-15 years all universities will use computer teachers every day.
