A World Where Grades Will Be Left Behind
Mary Beth Marklein wrote an article titled "A World Where Grades Will Be Left Behind," that was published in USA Today. This article gave a sneak peak of what education could look like in thirty years. Today, technology allows educators to personalize education and make it better. Sebastian Thrun, a google vice president and Stanford research professor says that, "you want learning to be as much fun as it is to play a video game." He founded an education company called Udacity after teaching a free online artificial intelligence course. Thrun's vision is to develop a catalog of free online courses taught by star professors from around the world. Across Silicon Valley, start-ups such as New Charter University and University Now, aim to make an online education as affordable as a cellphone bill.
With all the change that is going on now in education, how will education look in thirty years?
Learning and instruction will be free and available to anyone who wants it. No one is late for class and failure is not an option. A single class might enroll hundreds or even thousands of students. Classes will involve a series of increasingly more challenging exercises and quizzes aimed at helping students master a particular concept or skill. In this world, grades don't exist. Students will have as much time as they need to demonstrate mastery of a particular concept or skill.
Thrun says that just as film enabled people all over the world to access movies, the Internet will democratize education, which today reaches a tiny fraction of people who actually wants to learn. His vision of the future he says, offers "a message of hope and aspiration--not of destruction."
After reading this article, I can see the positives and negatives in Sebastian Thrun's vision of the future of education. College can be quite expensive, especially in today's economy. More often than not, students put themselves into thousands of dollars of debt with student loans. So before you even find a job with your degree and start working, you already have this huge stress of how you are going to pay back all of your loans and how long it will take. Thrun's vision of affordable college or maybe even free college is definitely positive. This means that anyone who wants to learn and further their education has the opportunity to do so. I also like the idea that classes will have activities that progressively challenge but also help students master a particular concept or skill. Part of the problem in today's education is that students aren't being challenged. If there is no challenge, are your students actually learning anything? Students must be challenged on different levels to demonstrate that they fully comprehend a particular concept or skill and know how to apply it. Thrun says that the Internet will make education accessible to everyone. I feel that if all of a student's classes are being taught online, then where are the hands-on experiences coming from? Seeing your teacher demonstrate how something is done and the ability of trying to do it yourself are parts of the learning process. By doing everything online and using the Internet as your only resource, you loose the hands-on experience. With online courses, you are basically teaching yourself. You have to ask questions through e-mail only and find out many answers on your own. Many people can not learn that way. Some people are visual learners. Some are auditory learners that need to hear the teacher lecture to better understand it. Others are more tactile learners who need to do it themselves. The Internet can not accomedate to everyone's learning styles.
Grades are a must in education. I really do not see how giving a students a grade won't exist in future education. There has to be some way to measure what your students have learned. There has to be a scale to measure each student's comprehension level and compare it with other students. Grades help you find each student's weak points and their strong points. They allow you to focus on the needs of each individual student so that you can strengthen their weaknesses. I think that it would be very chaotic and confusing if there wasn't a grading scale in education.
I hope that education looks different from this in thirty years. If this is what people are aiming for, then I am in the wrong profession. With everything being online, there is no need for teachers. We are being eliminated from the education system.
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