by Mary Beth Marklein view article
Sebastian Thurn
Sebastian Thurn is one of Google's Vice President's and an education research professor. He is founder of the company called UDACITY. His vision is to transform education so that learning is fun and free to all. He wants to see education respond to you. He would do away with grades and thinks grades are a failure of the education system. This type of education system would allow students to learn at their own pace and take all the time they need to learn the skill. He doesn't want to take over the traditional system but explains it as a change to the way we learn, not an end to our learning. I think it would be fun to learn using games as a base for learning new skills.
This strategy would require a new type of teaching for teachers and more training. Learning based on games might cause a problem like getting behind but if it has been researched and well planned, that kind of problem can be taken care of. Group collaboration on projects as the article talks about would probably work very well. The article also suggested opportunities to have instructors all over the world. That would be a great opportunity for students taking online classes...so many different points of view and so many different ideas. That's an opportunity that comes along once in a lifetime.
It's a challenge sometimes to make learning activities fun. It is a real challenge to make learning free most of the time. I don't know anyone who has a solution for making learning free. Where will the money come from? I am also unable to vision education and learning without structure. Learning can be fun but structure is needed to make that happen. When structure is absent from learning there is complete confusion and disorder! On the other hand, Mr. Thurn's vision might accommodate education that fits individual ways of learning.
We need changes in educating our children and other ways of evaluating their learning are needed as well. Test are not always good ways to determine if a student is learning. Some students are just not good test takers. Does passing tests mean you are going to succeed in life? I think not! Let's teach our students to succeed in life rather than just pass a test. Mr. Thurn stated "Failure is not an option." That's not reality. Reality is, that failure happens to many people a lot of the time. Those failures should not keep us down but in fact should be a spring board to doing better. We learn from our failures. Mr. Thurn's vision may be a good one for our future, but I don't think it's a good one right now. I don't think we're ready for it at this time.
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