Arnold Kling on some of the changes in education:

1. The use of YouTube for bite-sized lectures, as famously demonstrated by Khan Academy but widely used by others. (When I put up my statistics and economics lectures, what I quickly found was that each topic already had several competing lectures on YouTube.)

2. Video conferencing. Using this technology, it is easier to attend two seminars in different cities than it is to walk to two seminars on the same campus.

3. Artificial intelligence for assessment. It’s about more than just grading multiple choice tests. Something like ALEKS.com can grade numerical answers. A software course can grade you on whether your program works. My guess is that with sophisticated statistical software one could grade short-answer questions.

4. Real-time natural-language interaction (like the i-phone’s Siri). Now that I have “flipped the classroom” in statistics and I walk around giving students helpful hints, I think that my hint-giving could easily be automated. A student could talk into a phone, either to ask a question or describe a thought process, and the automated assistant could give the most appropriate prompt.