Special Assignment

World Were Grades Will be Left Behind

In the USA Today article A World Where Grades Will Be Left Behind by Mary Beth Marklein you as a reader are given a glimpse of this version of education and learning were it will be free and available to anyone who wants it. In this class room no one is late for class oh and students wont have to worry about failing a class because it is not an option, and a lesson in this classroom resembles something very similar to Angry Birds. The point they are trying to reach is that as a teacher "You want learning to be as much fun as it is to play a video game," says Sebastian Thrun, who is a Google vice president. Thrun founded his own education company called Udacity. He founded this company in January after teaching a free online artificial-intelligence course were he had more than 160,000 students. After this exposure to this new profound experience he announced he could no longer teach in a traditional classroom. He stated at the Digital-Life-Design conference "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill, you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I've taken the red pill, and I've seen Wonderland."
In this classroom with no windows producers create cool special effects, and there are video cameras that capture zoomed in shots of an instructor's hand. as the instructors hand writes diagrams and figures on a white board. This is just one example of what Thurn and his staff of twenty something are creating. In these courses such as making math matter In which the student rescues the Apollo 13 astronauts, stop the spread of epidemics, and fight forest fires. Thurn's Udacity is not the first or last high-tech experiment seeking to change and revolutionize education. Education is an industry that many critics agree is stuck in the last century and in dire need of major change. How will they start this change in education well Thurn's friend Sal Kahn has inspired a growing number of schools across the country to "flip" their classrooms. This is were the students study videos at night and finish their homework in the classroom. So the big question that is ask in this article is how will education look in 30 years? Technology is enabling educators to personalize education and scale it up were classes will involve a sequence of increasingly more challenging exercises and quizzes aimed at helping students master a particular concept or skill.

These classes might be composed of tens,hundreds, if not thousands of students. In this system there will be no more one size fits all. "Education will respond to you." Thurn says. Thurn calls "the failure of the education system" will not exist. In this style of education students will take as much or as little time as they need to demonstrate mastery of a particular skill or concept so it is all dependent on how much the student wants to learn. What makes it even better is the education will be free. Thrun says he's not planning a funeral for brick-and-mortar schools and colleges. He gave us a example of the movie industry were he showed us that as the film-making industry grew more sophisticated it did not end end the live theater. Instead movies became a different form of entertainment. One that could reach the masses at relatively low prices. After reading this article I have to agree with the author I think education needs a change and that if people what to learn then it is available to them without having to worry about failing the class because it all depends on how much the student want to take from the lessons.

My Thoughts

As a future teacher I honestly love to have a flipped classroom were I can be there to use my time in the classroom to actually help the students with their problems instead of lecturing them all day. I feel that if you allow the students to watch a a video that is a visual and a auditory way of learning that they will be able to understand the information better than they would if a teacher is just lecturing in the same monotone voice all day. I also think the no grades thing is a good Idea because most of the time a student only retains information for the upcoming test then forgets about 80% of the material. If the students what to learn they will learn and if they don't then they will wont. I believe that you get out of something with as much work as you put into it. so if you study hard and good you will learn the material if you dont study you wont learn nothing. I really enjoyed this assignment I found it rather insightful on were education is at and were it is heading in the future.