Special Blog Post

The Next 30 Years?

\As USA Today celebrates their 30th anniversary, they interviewed some of the greatest visionaries. This article,"A World Where Grades Would be Left Behind", is about Sebastian Thrun who is Google's vice president and a professor at Stanford. The article discusses Thrun’s plan to revolutionize education in the next 30 years. Education will change by no more one size fits all classes, it will respond to you, and there will be no failing students will be about to take as much time as they need to master a skill or concept. The instruction will be free but there will be a fee for certifications and exams. He describes this as a different form of education that will be able to accommodate large crowds and will have low prices. He explains how things are already changing in education like the “flipped classroom”, curriculum built around game-playing, and how some online college education is as affordable as a cellphone bill.

I think some of Sebastian Thrun’s ideas are great like the instruction will be free and education will respond to you. I like those ideas because I am a college student. And my tuition at the university keeps going up and up and up. My tuition and other school related fees each semester are easily 5,000. This is my junior year so you can roughly see how much I have spent in my college education. But I disagree with one major plan of Thrun’s, I do not like the idea of there will be no failing and students can take as much time as they need to master a skill or concept. I think there should be some guide lines to this because students can decide to take up to as long as they want. In this case, tests and assignments will have to be changed due to cheating among students.And I think grades are important in education because if not all students would be "ranked" the same and we all know all students are different. I think Thrun’s form of education would be beneficial in many ways but it still has some issues that need to be worked out.