Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Special Assignment

A world where grades will be left behind
This article was written by Mary Beth Marklein, for USA Today Newspaper, about
Sebastian Thrun, a Google vice president and Stanford research professor best
known for his role in building Google's driverless car. In the article Mr.
Thrun talks about his ideas about education. He taught an online class in
January that had over 160,000 students attend, after teaching that class he
felt like he could not go back to teaching his class at Stanford University. He
went on to found an education company named Udacity, where he hopes to develop a
catalog of free online courses taught by star professors from around the world.
The article goes on to state that Mr. Thrun does not believe in grades, in fact,
he calls grades the failure of the education system. The classes would be free
and will have tens of thousands of students.

I whole heartedly disagree with this article! Let me begin with the fallecy of
such endevors would be free! No one is going to volunteer their time to teach
with out being compensated. Mr. Thrun can do it because he is rich! Education
does not need to be revolutionalized, students need to want to learn and
educators need to want to educate! Education is a one size fit all area! That
is what creates competition, without grades, how does one differentiate between
barely passing and exceptional achievement?

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