This article and others like it are arguing against a strawman. No one ever proposed removing teachers from the equation. The idea is to leverage technology to

This article and others like it are arguing against a strawman. No one ever proposed removing teachers from the equation. The idea is to leverage technology to allow teachers to reach more students and/or teach more effectively. Sure, no online educational platform can rival a good teacher in a classroom setting yet, but that's because a good teacher is able to pick up on and respond to a lot more data through a physical interaction (a student's posture, tone, and other social cues) than a computer can online. That being said, in theory an online education platform should be able to track all that and more. They potentially have access to an incredible amount of data including the exact amount of time a user takes to engage with a lesson, how fast he or she is typing / is able to complete tasks, even the varying levels of difficulty at which different concepts are being learning, etc. This is all stuff that none of the current online education platforms have even tried to do anything with yet. But to say that an online education platform will never be as good as a teacher in a classroom is like going back to 60s and saying that computer image recognition sucks so we might as well stop trying.