In this USA Today article, A World Where Grades Will Be Left Behind, Mary Beth Marklein is writing about Sebastian Thrun, a Google Vice President who has founded an education company called Udacity. This is a company thats aim is to revolutionize education by making it as entertaining as possible and by making learning free. This is an interesting idea but how is this being funded if it is free? I do agree that learning should be fun so that students can effectively learn, but there still needs to be a sense of structure. This could be an effective way of learning for individualized learning but I feel like there are still many questions that should be addressed for this idea.
I do not agree with the idea that standardized tests are what we should structure our classes around. Students should be taught how to succeed in life and not how to just simply pass or score high enough on the standardized tests they are required to take. Students will fail and that is perfectly fine, we all fail at some point in life, but this idea of learning does not allow for failure. I know I have failed many times (even failed classes) and I have learned that failure is a part of the learning process. I think that students also benefit from having a teacher push them and seeing that teacher wanting them to succeed. With these classes being online and teachers having so many students to tend to I think students will not receive this kind of connection with their teachers. I do think that education needs to catch up with technology but I am not sure that this idea of education is quite what we need.
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