Would it be better to prefer a living or mechanical teacher? That depends of course of the personality of the learner as well as the personality of the teacher in question, and of the functions of the tutoring programs. Therefore we cannot say which one would be best in each individual case. But we can compare the two alternatives. We have a golden oppurtunity to make the quality of teaching better by seeing what the tutoringøprograms are missing and then programming them to do better. Human teachers can of course be educated as well, but their teaching is always attached to their personality whereas a programs "personality" is controlled by its creator.

A computer is in a way a more individual teacher when used in schools than a human, because the human teacher often has about 30 students to handle at the same time and his memory and capacity to process information is limited. A computer can hold specific information of the results of each student, who also can work by the computer one at a time. But a human can react and respond to different cases and situations in an unique way and is also able to use empathy. Earlier computerized tutoring programs could only give the student a right and wrong answer, no matter how the individual had reached the answer. A human teacher instead seems to put a lot of attention on motivating the student, giving him feedback of his attitude and actions. Could a mechanical program do this?

When investigating human tutors, it has been found that the important points through which the teacher affects the learner seem to be about four aspects of tutorial interventions. They are control, the question about how much the tutor should intervene with the student´s work, timing, when should this happen, content, what should the tutor say, and style, how should it be said (Mandl & Lesgold, 1988, p.247). By paying attention to these four points, a mechanical program can be socialized a bit. The problem with making a tutoring program better is just that too little investigations have been made about the answers to the questions mentioned above. We do not know for example how feedback should be presented to get the best results. Each student is an individual with individual needs. But there is some possible solutions which could help the development of the tutoring programs.

A human tutor could help the program by feeding it with information about each student that is using it, his or her learning style. For example if the student is said to be active in trying to find new solutions to problems, the computer would not interfere so much with the students problem solving process. The program can also be programmed to give more informational feedback rather than controlling. It can say what part of the problem solving process went wrong and how it could be looked at differently rather than just giving the right answer. The program could also remember the student´s earlier efforts and in this way give cheers when the student has made progress. Or the program could simply offer the student more alternatives by asking what kind of learning style he or she prefers (Mandl & Lesgold, 1988 , p 251-252).

The role of feedback is crucial for learning new skills. Behaviorists think that all learning is a result of supported or non-supported actions; rewards make one learn that this is the way to do it. When using tutoring programs, the programs way of giving feedback serves as a reward or a punishment. Therefore special attention should be paid to this area (Mandl & Lesgold, 1988, p 187).