Education is already structured like game with every every feature of gamification like points(scores) and grades(levels) and Leaderboards and so on... But it is a very boring and badly designed game.
Playing a physical game like football and maintaining a good physique for winning a football game seems a lot more fun than exercising to not be sick. Same thing could be said about khan academy. Would it not be awesome that a student can learn 50+25=75 without having to pull out an iPhone to calculate the same... Does it matter whether he did it for energy points or self improvement. A student with good "skills" will likely find it easier to navigate more meaningful content in the future like graph interpretation without even noticing that "the algorithmic skill" came in handy. I totally agree that something like KA is not a solution but just piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
One of the students of the stanford online classes ended up making a cellphone powered self driving car by going through the online class. While the student got the basic framework and ideas from the class, he must have learned a huge amount of stuff putting it all together. Learning is very human no doubt. But it can happen in the minds of the learner. Thrun or Andrew Ng do not need to actually talk to the student by standing a few feet away. They just need to empower and inspire students to work on awesome projects. The students can learn by themselves and each other.
Playing a physical game like football and maintaining a good physique for winning a football game seems a lot more fun than exercising to not be sick. Same thing could be said about khan academy. Would it not be awesome that a student can learn 50+25=75 without having to pull out an iPhone to calculate the same... Does it matter whether he did it for energy points or self improvement. A student with good "skills" will likely find it easier to navigate more meaningful content in the future like graph interpretation without even noticing that "the algorithmic skill" came in handy. I totally agree that something like KA is not a solution but just piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
One of the students of the stanford online classes ended up making a cellphone powered self driving car by going through the online class. While the student got the basic framework and ideas from the class, he must have learned a huge amount of stuff putting it all together. Learning is very human no doubt. But it can happen in the minds of the learner. Thrun or Andrew Ng do not need to actually talk to the student by standing a few feet away. They just need to empower and inspire students to work on awesome projects. The students can learn by themselves and each other.