The Future of Education – Virtual Learning

What does the future of education look like in a wired world? Indian education expert Sugata Mitra conducts a daring experiment. In an Indian village, he builds a school that only exists virtually, in the cloud.

What is virtual learning?

Virtual learning is a learning experience that is enhanced through utilizing computers and/or the internet both outside and inside the facilities of the educational organization. The instruction most commonly takes place in an online environment.

It has the potential to improve student achievement, educational access and schools’ cost-effectiveness. Specifically, virtual learning uses computer software, the Internet or both to deliver instruction to students. The use of virtual classrooms for live online teaching brings distance learning closer to the traditional form of learning by reproducing its main characteristics in the online environment. This type of learning combines virtual and traditional forms of teaching.

How does it work?

Virtual learning uses computer software, the Internet or both to deliver instruction to students. This minimizes or eliminates the need for teachers and students to share a classroom. Virtual learning does not include the increasing use of e-mail or online forums to help teachers better communicate with students and parents about coursework and student progress; as helpful as these learning management systems are, they do not change how students are taught.

Virtual Learning comes in several forms –

• Computer-based
• Internet-based
• Remote Teacher Online
• Blended Learning
• Facilitated Online Learning

Video Summary

The education system in the Indian Subcontinent originates from the last and biggest empires in the world, the British Empire and it came about 300 years ago. At that time the Victorians created a Global Computer made of people, that is a bureaucratic administrative machine.

To run this machine they need lots of people. They created another machine named school to produce these people. The British Empire is gone but their colonial legacy in the educational field is still there. In the Sundarban region of India, Professor Sugata Mitra builds a school that only exists virtually, in the clouds.

In 1999 he conducted the ‘Hole In The Wall’ experiment. He made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to his office and stuck a computer inside it just to observe what would happen if he connected high-speed internet to it, turned it on and left it there.

The result of this experiment was that children in groups were succeeding in learning how to use a computer. Children formed a pattern and were acting like insects in a completely chaotic situation. During the experiment the children were without any supervision and they were acting at the edge of chaos. Professor Mita explained the result of this experiment from the perspective of Physics.

According to Donald Clark, a digital educator, this hole in the wall experiment may actually result in a form of educational colonialism where they just parachute shiny objects into these remote areas of countries and hope for the best. In his opinion the idea of Professor Mitra is bold and a bit utopian.

In 2013 The Ted Prize funded seven schools in the cloud in India and England. The experiment lasted for 3 years. According to Sally Rix, who works for Sole Project, there’s an increasingly prescriptive list of content that students have to cover in a year and they do not use the internet in a meaningful way in the schools.

At the beginning of the experiment Professor Mitra conceived ideas from students about how they think the virtual school should be. The virtual school was built just like the students want it. In virtual learning the role of the teachers is not negligible, rather they play an important role in helping them understand how to construct an answer to a complicated question.

In virtual learning the interaction between children and computers generates learning. According to Professor Mitra the teacher has to do something different in case of virtual learning. The teacher has to convert the content into a question that would enable the learner to derive that content computationally.

After the inauguration of a virtual school in Korakati Professor Mitra observed that when children first start using computers, they spontaneously formed groups then after a while everybody’s on to one group presumably because that group has found something interesting and then they deflock and then they form new groups.

Professor Mitra began using mediators in 2006 to support the holes in the wall in India. They became known as ‘The Granny Cloud’. This experiment was set up to test the limits of this system. He put in a hole in the world computers and downloaded all kinds of stuff from the internet about DNA replication and came back after two months and he gave them a test their scores had gone up from zero to thirty percent.

In order to increase their scores a teacher was hired whose only job was to encourage the children just like grandmothers. Their scores jumped to 50% after giving them encouragement. To run the schools in the cloud more efficiently they hired coordinators who guided the children.

At the end of 13 years of the project it did not illustrate everything that Professor Mitra could predict but it disproved many things and it brought in new questions. The best thing that a research project can do is not so much reduce the answers as to produce the next set of questions.

Video Timeline

0:00 – Intro
2:00 – Education System in India
7:48 – The Hole In The Wall Experiment
13:32 – Designing The Virtual School
16:30 – Criticism of the Experiment
25:00 – Inauguration
30:00 – Using Mediators to Support the Experiment
34:30 – Sessions with Grannies/Co-ordinators
40:00 – Outro