I can already see how this would go down:

At first it would be awesome. Through thousands of hours of painstaking research, early pioneers in the field develop teaching software that turns the process of learning into an exact science. Students are shown to almost universally perform better thanks to the new automated teaching methods. University professors can focus more on research and they can stop having lousy T.A.s teach all the lower level courses. All standard 100 level classes become software-based and face time with the professor is limited to 1hr/per week question-and-answer sessions. This actually benefits the students, because they are no longer stuck in a giant lecture hall with 100 others. It's more intimate and they can actually focus on discussion. Apart from the unfortunate job contraction in the teaching field, everyone benefits. The quality of university education improves all around.

Then, a few years pass. Textbook publishers start to panic as they see the current model of teaching turned upside down. They scramble to get into the teaching software game as quickly as possible. Within a few years they develop their own teaching software for every subject. It's basically just reading assignments and multiple choice exams crudely pasted together by programmers from outsourcing companies in India. The quality of these new products is terrible, but they have one key advantage: they are cheaper. The heads of departments at universities don't really know the difference, since all of this is new technology. The research just says that "students perform better with automated teaching". It doesn't specify which product to use, so they go with the inferior products. Thanks to aggressive marketing and government lobbying on part of the textbook companies, administrators don't really have any other options anyway. The market quickly becomes dominated by inferior products, and the original pioneering companies either join the orgy of shit or die.

Now, it's ten years later. Students' performance has started to drop dramatically. People grow nostalgic for "the old days" when professors actually taught classes. Everyone has started to realize that there is a problem but they don't know how to fix it. Where did it all go wrong? They obviously can't go back to the old way since they are now entirely invested in these new technologies, but how do they make it work again?

Committees are formed, the issue is investigated, and the result is that a new government body is created to monitor the quality of teaching tools. What used to be a capitalist enterprise, driven by innovation, is now an industry that needs strict government oversight and regulation to ensure the quality of teaching software. The government invests billions in researching these tools to determine the same things that the innovators in the industry already discovered ten years earlier. The price of all of this new government regulation is that all of the money that was originally saved by hiring less teachers is now funneled into a giant government bureaucracy. And the cost to students has gone up too, since now the teaching software has tripled in price due to all of the red tape that software companies have to wade through.

In the end, the new system costs the same or more, the quality is still mediocre, and everybody bitches endlessly about the old days. Nothing changes, except that the bureaucracy keeps getting bigger and bigger. Talented people will keep trying to develop new innovations to make education better, and their ideas are great, it's just that they are doomed from the start, because the system is so fucking broken that it will always turn their best laid plans into shit.

Call me a pessimist.