This document provides a brief history of teaching machines and automated education. It includes quotes from Thomas Edison in 1922 who believed that motion pictures could revolutionize education by achieving 100% efficiency compared to 2% from textbooks. Characteristics of early teaching machines are described as breaking content into small testable units, providing immediate feedback, and allowing students to move at their own pace. The document also quotes B.F. Skinner about using reinforcement techniques to precisely control behavior and learning. Finally, it quotes Sidney Pressey advocating for an "industrial revolution" in education using technology to modernize inefficient procedures and free teachers and students from drudgery.

1. Teaching Machines
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A (Brief) History of “Teaching at Scale”
The Future of Learning at Scale - #t509Massive
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Audrey Watters
@audreywatters

3. “I believe that the motion picture is destined to
revolutionize our educational system and that in a
few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the
use of textbooks. I should say that on the average
we get about two percent efficiency out of
schoolbooks as they are written today. The
education of the future, as I see it, will be
conducted through the medium of the motion
picture… where it should be possible to obtain one
hundred percent efficiency”
— Thomas Edison, 1922

7. Characteristics of a “teaching machine”:
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1. content broken down into small
(testable) units
2. immediate feedback
3. students “move at their own pace”
4. automation

13. “Comparable results have been obtained with pigeons,
rats, dogs, monkeys, human children… and psychotic
subjects. In spite of great phylogenetic differences, all
these organisms show amazingly similar properties of
the learning process. It should be emphasized that this
has been achieved by analyzing the effects of
reinforcement and by designing techniques that
manipulate reinforcement with considerable precision.
Only in this way can the behavior of the individual be
brought under such precise control.”
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— B. F. Skinner

15. “There must be an ‘industrial revolution’ in education, in which
educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology
combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy
procedures of conventional education. Work in the schools of the
future will be marvelously though simply organized, so as to
adjust almost automatically to individual differences and the
characteristics of the learning process.There will be many labor-saving
schemes and devices,and even machines — not at all for
the mechanizing of education,but for the freeing of teacher and
pupil from educational drudgery and incompetence.”
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— Sidney Pressey