George Seimens writes about higher ed here, but I wonder to what extent this is relevant for K-12 as well:
What is valuable, however, is that which can’t be duplicated without additional input costs: personal feedback and assessment, contextualized and personalized navigation through complex topics, encouragement, questioning by a faculty member to promote deeper thinking, and a context and infrastructure of learning. Basically: human input costs make education valuable. We can’t duplicate personal interaction without spending more money. We can scale content, but we can’t scale encouragement. We can improve lecturing through peer teaching, but we can’t scale the timely interventions and nudges by faculty that influence deeper learning. [Emphasis mine.]
As schooling becomes more “personalized” through technology (and it will), our articulated value will have to change away from content delivery and more to a focus on the learning process. Still up for debate for me is to what extent to which that human input is done face to face or virtually. (See the Granny Cloud, for instance.)