I’m the person you want to contact for all things Marketing, Branding, Tech, Startups, Strategy, Social and Beer. Founder, Technium Labs, excited about potential of web in learning and intrigued by digital natives. Perviously Co-Founder Claimat.com & VP Intl Aptech Ltd.
The core value proposition of Khan Academy is the content they produce which is amazing stuff. LurnQ on the other hand is a consumer tool that aims to simplify online learning. It helps you manage your learning in the open learning ecosystem. It i somewhat like GitHub for learning and unless you signup the experience can not be delivered.
well there are already a few apps such as musicaroid that searches Music and Video by using Yahoo Music(US) API, Google Youtube API, iTunes Store API. Than there are apps like Hound and Midomi where serach happens through voice & humming... and we can look forward to some great stuff when technologies like "Intelligent A.I. search' being developed by Ray Kurzweil at Google becomes a reality.
I absolutely agree with your concerns. However there are very high number if success stories indicating that technology is the only solution. Very large scale adoption of services like Google apps for education, Edmodo, BetterLessons and Desire2Learn are the examples.