Dymocks Education closes classrooms, tells parents to use ChatGPT

The move is unusual because the company selling tutoring is the one telling customers to stop paying for it. Dymocks Education CEO Mark Buckland told the Australian Financial Review that most users would be better off spending money on cheaper ways to learn, and he described tutoring as mainly repetitive practice rather than something only a tutoring company can provide.

The decision lands while the Australian tutoring industry is still active. Mohan Dhall, who leads an Australian tutoring industry body, told AFR the withdrawal was unexpected, and Matrix Education CEO David Ramadge said about 8,000 people take its lessons around Sydney each term and that number is growing. Matrix Education also offers AI to help students, but Ramadge believes top students will keep seeking face-to-face teaching and that human tutors cannot be replaced by AI.

Buckland predicts demand for remedial tutoring aimed at giving high-achieving students an extra edge will disappear within about five years. Whether that holds may depend on how quickly AI tutoring improves, and on a point raised by Ben Zunica, who teaches mathematics at the University of Sydney: students may turn to AI for immediate answers, whereas a human tutor can hold back the answer and work through the reasoning step by step. The experiment cited in the article, in which adults preparing for the GRE saw similar gains in combined math and verbal accuracy from an hour with an AI tutor or a human expert, offers some support for AI's effectiveness, but the debate over its limits is likely to continue.