Anne Trumbore
“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.
Praise & Reviews
“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
“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
“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
“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
About Anne Trumbore
As an early-stage employee at Coursera, NovoEd, and Stanford’s Online High School, Anne helped pioneer new forms of student-centered online education. Her work has resulted in a number of publications on online pedagogy and history, the future of higher education, and the future of work. She holds an AB from Brown University, and MA from San Francisco State University, and an EdD from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a 24-25 Stanford Futures Fellow.