From AI tutors who ensure individualized instruction but cannot do math to free online courses from elite universities that were supposed to democratize higher education, claims that technological innovations will transform education often fall short. Yet, as Anne Trumbore shows in The Teacher in the Machine, the promises of today鈥檚 cutting-edge technologies aren鈥檛 new. Long before the excitement about the disruptive potential of generative AI鈥損owered tutors and massive open online courses, scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and artificial intelligence in education. Trumbore argues that the contrast between these two eras of educational technology reveals the changing role of higher education in the United States as it shifted from a public good to a private investment.
Writing from a unique insider鈥檚 perspective and drawing on interviews with key figures, historical research, and case studies, Trumbore traces today鈥檚 disparate discussions about generative AI, student loan debt, and declining social trust in higher education back to their common origins at a handful of elite universities fifty years ago. Arguing that those early educational experiments have resonance today, Trumbore points the way to a more equitable and collaborative pedagogical future. Her account offers a critical lens on the history of technology in education just as universities and students seek a stronger hand in shaping the future of their institutions.
Anne Trumbore is Chief Digital Learning Officer at the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Previously, she led Wharton Online and helped develop new forms of student-centered online education at Coursera, NovoEd, and Stanford’s Online High School.
"Well-researched, fluently written. . . . A stunning expos茅 of how universities made, and lost, the Faustian bargain with big tech."鈥�Kirkus Reviews
“Everything new is new again. Trumbore deftly shows how the dream of using technology to ‘revolutionize’ teaching and learning is as enduring as it is elusive. And though the dream always comes in the name of science and progress, its drivers are, inevitably, politics and money. The Teacher in the Machine is a cautionary tale, but it is also a guide from a seasoned educator and businesswoman for anyone trying to make wise decisions about learning technologies in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Read it.”—Mitchell Stevens, Stanford University
“Anne Trumbore had a front row seat to higher ed’s biggest technology shifts in the last two decades: from computer tutoring, to massive online courses, to the outsourcing of online higher ed to for-profit companies. In The Teacher in the Machine, she combines historical research with her own up-close perspective to explain how increasing entanglements with edtech businesses may be leading universities astray from their mission at a moment where public support is both wavering and essential.”—Justin Reich, author of Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education
“The Teacher in the Machine tells the story of the birth and evolution of MOOCs (massive open online courses) within the context of the history of educational technology. This book should be required reading for every university leader charged with making decisions around educational technology, online learning, and AI.”—Josh Kim, Dartmouth College, coauthor of Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education
“Anne Trumbore offers an engaging insider’s perspective on the long history of ed-tech entrepreneurship, one that dates much, much farther back than ‘the year of the MOOC.’ This book is a necessary and urgent corrective to education technology’s amnesia—this forgetting of the past that keeps schools trapped in a cycle of crisis, a cycle in which tech entrepreneurs swoop in again and again with magical solutions that fix little but destabilize much.”—Audrey Watters, author of Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning
“How can technology disrupt education? As Anne Trumbore demonstrates, that’s the wrong question. It imagines that universities are inefficient and endangered institutions, and that only the white knight of technological innovation can save them. Yet educational technology is neither as new—nor as disruptive—as we like to think. The real question is how we can use it to serve learners, not investors. Anyone who wants to answer it will have to consult this smart little book.”—Jonathan Zimmerman, University of Pennsylvania
“Introduce the thoroughly change-resistant sector of higher education to the possibilities created by massive computing power and the global connective fiber of the internet and what do you get? We are all still waiting for the much-needed answer. But we will make fewer naive mistakes if we absorb Anne Trumbore’s account of what happens when sectors collide. Combining history with an insider’s perspective, The Teacher in the Machine reminds us of the motives and values that will determine what comes next in this sociotechnical adventure.”—James L. Shulman, author of The Synthetic University
