I read this interesting article and then shared with friends on Facebook who are higher education teachers. Thinking about exactly what the study in the submitted article shows, in view of having had a child recently take an introductory statistics course, I think that the result may be rather limited to the course described, an introductory course in statistics for students who will not go on to major in statistics. This result may not generalize to other subjects (although, for reasons suggested by other commenters, it is important to do the research and find out what teaching methods are effective for all subjects).

Most introductory statistics courses are crap, going wrong right at the start by hiring the wrong instructor and specifying the wrong textbook.

http://statland.org/MyPapers/MAAFIXED.PDF

Statistics, the "science of data," is actually an endlessly fascinating subject, from the introductory level on up, but few statistics courses are taught in a manner that requires anything but a robot to present the material, and those statistics courses are so dull that they don't encourage student engagement. In fact, statistics gets into some deep issues about the nature of correct inference right from the beginning,

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz#page-1

and it occurs to me that a really, really good statistics course might be a lot harder to automate (although this would be a worthy challenge for artificial intelligence researchers) than the bleak general run of introductory statistics courses.

As a good human statistics teacher, and perhaps even a good automated statistics teacher, would say, further research on this point is needed. One of the best examples I have seen of application of artificial intelligence (software) to teaching of a foundational subject is the ALEKS

http://www.aleks.com/

online K-12 mathematics course, used by a variety of higher education institutions to supplement remedial courses, and used by an increasing number of secondary and elementary schools and self-taught learners of all ages to learn mathematics and some closely related subjects. (ALEKS has a statistics course

http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/course_products?cmscache=de...

that mostly covers the dull issues rather than the cool issues in statistics.) I like ALEKS a lot for my children learning mathematics and for myself and my wife learning basic principles of sole proprietorship accounting. The ALEKS learning spaces model

http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/research_behind

is based on some very interesting research, and I have previously recommended that the Khan Academy developers assimilate that research base as they continue developing the Khan Academy courses.

Based on real-world examples, it just might be that automated presentation of many forms of course content will be more efficient (resulting in more learning for fewer dollars in less time) than current in-person models of instruction. And everyone should be happy about that. There will always be a role for in-person teachers, and they do their best work if they use their comparative advantage of being able to do some things better than machines, even if everyone acknowledges that some machines do some kinds of teaching better than most human beings. Let the research continue, until we have an abundance of good data.