Students at the School in the Cloud in Korakati, India, investigate the questions that matter to them online, with the assistance of a teacher via the Granny Cloud.

“Early one morning last February, a man turned up on my doorstep who had travelled through the night to get there,” said Sugata Mitra, the education reformer who received the 2013 TED Prize. “This schoolteacher wanted to do something positive for his village, which had no electricity, health care or primary education … It was just the kind of place I was looking for.”

Korakati is a remote village in one of the poorest parts of India, in the middle of a mangrove swamp. It’s hardly the place that most people would seek out to try to build a high-tech learning lab. But then again, Sugata Mitra is not most people. Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the CloudAt TED2013, Mitra shared his long-standing dream—to build a School in the Cloud, where children could ask big questions and explore the answers themselves using the vast resources available online.

A leading advocate of the self-directed learning movement, when Mitra arrived in Korakati upon this schoolteacher’s suggestion, his reputation preceded him. Many had heard about the man from Calcutta, 800 miles to the east, who was trying to revolutionize education, making it accessible to all children, not just the privileged few. This local schoolteacher had made the long trek, crossing miles of rugged terrain on a rickshaw, in order to meet India’s beloved education pioneer face-to-face.

It didn’t take much to convince Mitra that Korakati would be the perfect spot to build a location of the School in the Cloud. With his $1 million TED Prize seed money, Mitra planned seven of these learning labs across India and the U.K. The first opened in in Killingworth, England in November of 2013—inside George Stephenson High School. A second lab has since opened in the U.K., inside a school in Newton Aycliffe. Meanwhile, two additional labs have opened in classrooms in Delhi and Chandrakona, India. But the Korakati lab is unique. It’s the first independent School in the Cloud, constructed from the ground up.

The School in the Cloud in Korakati, India, is the first constructed to be a hub for self-directed learning.

Just last week, Mitra — a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University – unveiled the fruits of his labor. Located in the heart of the world’s largest mangrove forest, the stark new learning lab stands out against the lush backdrop, like a cloud in fact. Inside, children buzz around computers, their eyes wide with fascination and disbelief. Many of them had never seen a computer before, but that didn’t matter. Within hours they would teach themselves how to use it.

“If you give a group of children a set of questions and a computer with an internet connection, they will be able to find answers — whatever the difficulty level. Interestingly, the more random the group, the better,” said Mitra, who speaks with passion and conviction, which is probably why his TED2013 talk has garnered nearly 2 millions views.

Mitra’s work is motivated by his belief that children are perfectly capable of teaching themselves almost anything when left to their own devices and access to a computer. He knew this from his 1999 “hole in the wall” experiment, in which he placed a free computer in a Delhi slum. To his surprise, groups of street children, with no knowledge of English, taught themselves not only how to use the computer but a new language.  It’s this startling research, which he later repeated, that inspired School in the Cloud.

At School in the Cloud learning labs, children embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information. These Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) stimulate curiosity and inspire learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. But at the same time, students get mentoring and encouragement on the way. Mitra designed this learning platform to include a Granny Cloud, a consortium of teachers who are available over Skype from a remote location to help mentor the children as they explore information.

“What we are looking at is minimally invasive learning, and not unguided learning,” says Mitra. “Until it can replace the conventional learning system, it can complement it.”

After all, why not reach for the stars?

Students in the lab learn via the School in the Cloud web platform. Microsoft and Skype are the core technology partners for this digital platform; Made By Many were the product design partners; and IDEO assisted with design research.

By Natasha Scripture

Sugata Mitra thinks big. At last year’s TED, he unveiled his dream to transform primary education. Instead of a teacher, a chalkboard and a generic curriculum, the recipient of the 2013 TED Prize asked us to imagine an environment that empowered children to learn on their own, with the guidance of virtual mentors. Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the CloudIt involved nothing more than a few computers, an Internet connection and a bunch of curious minds. He called this utopian world School in the Cloud, a Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE), or simply put, a place where children could tap into their innate sense of wonder by connecting with information online.

A year later, Mitra returned to the TED stage to give an update. He has opened five learning labs — three in India and two in the UK — with two more slated to open in May. Mitra is also the subject of a School in the Cloud documentary being filmed by British director Jerry Rothwell, the winner of the Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award. The trailer was released during TED2014, giving viewers a taster of all the work that went into building the School in the Cloud and a candid look at Sugata Mitra himself. Because let’s face it: some people thought his head was in the clouds when he conceived of this idea … But now, kids around the world are learning in this exciting new way.

At the same time, Mitra — a professor at Newcastle University — has also pioneered a digital tool, a virtual School in the Cloud Community Platform with the help of core technology and innovation partner Microsoft and their Skype Social Good team. The web platform, launched this week, ensures that anyone, anywhere around the world can experiment with self-organized learning. Made by Many, the product design team, spent six months co-creating the platform with Mitra’s team, Microsoft and children themselves, to ensure that the experience translates across cultural and economic barriers. Essentially, it is a giant global experiment in self-organized learning, inviting everyone to help design the future of learning.

Students use the School in the Cloud web platform.

The online platform acts as a one-stop shop for people interested in exploring self-organized learning. It includes an easy tool to start a SOLE and a library of resources showcasing Mitra’s research and the philosophy behind self-organized learning. The platform is also the hub for a network of Skype Grannies — retired teachers who encourage children by asking them the kinds of questions that get them thinking. For those interested in becoming a Skype Granny, or online mentor, the Community Platform guides them through the registration process and prepares them for their role in the self-organized learning environment. Educators and kids can quickly connect online or via text message with a Skype Granny, to embark on intellectual adventures.

But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the platform is the SOLE session tools. Not only do these tools guide children by posing big questions, their intellectual journey is easily tracked by selecting language, images and videos for a final presentation. It’s this process that sparks curiosity and culminates with a dynamic and critical discussion– all essential skills to prepare children for the future. Educators can also track children’s engagement, confidence and “search skills.”

The web platform was developed so anyone could discover self-organized learning. It’s a global opportunity to experiment, and together, design a future of learning that is as relevant in northeast England as it is in rural West Bengal. More than anything, School in the Cloud is a place, an experience and a community – an organic movement toward more inclusive, universal education.

A closer look at the School in the Cloud web platform.

What do a British chef, a Newcastle University professor and an anti-corruption activist have in common? They’re all winners of the TED Prize – a cash award, currently for $1,000,000, given annually to a forward-thinking individual with a fresh, bold vision for sparking global change to make the world a better place.

The Prize begins with a big wish – one that will motivate people around the world to get involved. Imagine an inspiring, high-impact idea that needs the support of a global community of activists, big thinkers and social entrepreneurs. Each TED Prize winner is a rare and powerful combination: someone who knows how to capture imaginations as well as how to make a measurable impact. From Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (2010) to Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud (2013) to our most recent Prize winner Charmian Gooch and her campaign against anonymous corporations, the TED Prize has helped to tackle child obesity, advance education, improve global health and inspire art around the world.

Note: we may just have announced Charmian’s win, but we’re already looking for our 2015 winner. The deadline for this year’s applications is March 31, so nominate yourself — or someone else you think might fit the bill. Anyone can win the TED Prize, including TED Fellows, speakers and community members. Here’s a guide to filling out the nomination form – and here some tips for writing a killer application. Good luck!

Filmmaker Jerry Rothwell films a family in Korakati, India. He is making a documentary that tells the story of the School in the Cloud. Photo: Courtesy of Jerry Rothwell

British director Jerry Rothwell, the winner of the first annual Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award, has spent the past year trailing TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra as he sets up the first locations of the School in the Cloud. Traveling between a remote village in India and a forward-thinking elementary school in the U.K., Rothwell has watched Mitra, a Newcastle University professor, plant the seeds of his global education experiment that lets children learn on their own, and from each other, by tapping into online resources and their inner sense of wonder.

The subject matter of School in the Cloud is definitely different from Rothwell’s previous films, which include Donor Unknown, about a sperm donor and his many offspring; Town of Runners, about an Ethiopian village famed for its athletes; and Heavy Load, about a group of people with learning disabilities who form a punk band. But Rothwell says he has long been interested in education and technology, so was up for this challenge.

School in the Cloud is slated for release in April 2015. Now that Rothwell is halfway through the project, we thought we’d check in with him to see how it’s going …

What’s the thing that you hear Sugata say the most?

Sugata’s mantra for adults is “don’t intervene.” That’s both really interesting, and challenging. Sometimes it’s the most challenging thing I find about the work. A month ago, I was at the new lab in Chandrakona, India, which just opened, and I was filming kids who’d never used a computer before explore one for the first time. There were four or five of them around this computer and they’d reached an error message where to them it seemed frozen. In fact, all they needed to do was click “OK,” but they couldn’t figure that out. I watched them for 20 minutes, wanting to intervene and show them that simple step, but because Sugata’s whole philosophy is that you can’t intervene, I didn’t do anything. His research suggests that when children find out things for themselves — and start showing what they’ve learned to other students in the room — they are going to retain it much better than if someone just comes and sorts them out. It’s difficult for someone in a teaching role, but I think he’s right.

Students at the School in the Cloud in India excitedly figure out how to use a computer. Photo: Courtesy of Jerry Rothwell

Some critics find Sugata Mitra’s ideas around ‘minimally invasive education’ radical. What do you make of the controversy around Sugata’s philosophy?

I think there is a tension between the rhetoric around his work and the work itself. Take for example the idea of self-organization, which is at the heart of the project. A great deal of organization of various kinds goes into making the work effective – so the question of what constitutes ‘self-organization’ depends on which part of the process you’re looking at. In some ways, Sugata is a provocateur. He strips educational processes down to something very simple and pure in order to challenge the way we do things. I think some of the opposition to his work doesn’t take account of the need for that provocation, and the context of it.

This is a global project. How did you decide what and where to film?

Very soon after I got the award, I traveled with Sugata to [India] with the idea of choosing where we would base the film. The project is spread in many different locations, but I wanted to go deep rather than wide, and try to look at the impact of these ideas in detail with a very few people: one family in a very remote Indian village, one “Granny” in the UK, one teacher in a primary school in the northeast of England. Fairly quickly, we decided to focus on the little village of Korakati in the Ganges Delta, primarily because it was the most remote place Sugata was working in, with no Internet or electricity. If the ideas work there, they will work anywhere. There are so many practical issues. To get there, you have to drive for three hours, take a boat down the Ganges and then hire a rickshaw to take you along a bumpy brick path for an hour or so. To build there, they had to carry all the construction materials – bricks, glass, computers – on that journey. We chose it because that community has had no access to computers at all in the past, so we could document the impact not just of the School In the Cloud, but of the arrival of the Internet.

Sugata Mitra watches a group of children as they investigate the question: What is algebra? Photo: Courtesy of Jerry Rothwell

Talk to me a little bit about the kids.

I’ve worked in two kinds of environments on this project — in India and in the UK. In India, it’s all about getting the adults out of the room.  Then the kids will start teaching each other things with a lot of excitement. One girl in Chandrakona said to us, “I’m hoping that this project will help me go from being just a village girl to a modern girl.”

In a primary school in Gateshead, on the other hand, the teacher — Amy Dickinson — has taken on Sugata’s ideas and is encouraging colleagues across the school to use the facility for self-organized learning during school lessons. The teacher will start with a broad, almost philosophical question, like “How do you measure a mountain?” or “Will robots replace humans?” The conversations and exchanges that happen between the kids as they research are really interesting. It challenges teachers a bit, to step back from their role as a classroom leader, where they usually give strong direction and maintain a high degree of order. It’s about empowering the children. In Gateshead, there is a committee of young people in the school running the space.  They’ll even bring forward a complaint if they feel a teacher is misusing the room in order to teach a conventional lesson or using it more like an IT suite.

So there’s a big difference between the Indian and British contexts. The current western education system already has more inquiry-based learning. It is part of teachers’ everyday practice; whereas in my limited experience of the Indian system, it’s far more likely to be a teacher at the front, writing on the chalkboard as the kids chant it and learn it by rote. Sugata’s ideas are an important challenge to that system, urging us to link the amazing resource of the Internet with children’s innate desire to learn about the world, placing the tools for learning in their hands. That doesn’t mean you don’t need teachers, but it means they have a different role.

As an artist, how has this been different from the other projects you have worked on? Has it influenced the kinds of projects you will take on in the future?

This is my fifth feature documentary. Each of my films have been on very different topics. One was about a sailor who faked his journey around the world, another was about a sperm donor whose kids were coming to find him, and my most recent was about two young Ethiopian girls who want to be athletes. I guess the common theme is trying to tell stories from the bottom up, from within the character’s experience instead of commentating on it from the outside.  I try to embed the film in the point of view of those it is about. For School in the Cloud, I’m working alongside Indian filmmaker Ranu Ghosh, who lives in Kolkata and has been able to develop close relationships with the families. One aspect of the project which is different from my previous films is that in some ways it’s a film about ideas — almost like a science or philosophy documentary —  because of the nature of the person Sugata is. He is an incredibly inquisitive man, about everything. You want to capture that in the film, because he is so engaging.

Read more about the School in the Cloud »

Find out about the Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award »

This post originally ran on the TED Prize Blog. Read more about TED Prize wishes »

Two students in Mr. J’s class laugh as they teach themselves about Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution. Photo: Natasha Scripture

Eleven-year-olds running a classroom? That could sound outlandish to some elementary school teachers, but not to Joe Jamison, or “Mr. J” as he is affectionately called by his fifth-grade students at Lawrence Intermediate School in central New Jersey.

“I learn from my kids,” says Mr. J, as he dips his hand into a Philadelphia Eagles football helmet — otherwise known as the “helmet of fate” — and pulls out the name of the next group of students to give a presentation on Mercy Otis Warren, an American playwright and poet, not to mention one of the few female propagandists of the American Revolution, which Mr. J’s class is studying.

There is a feeling of excitement in the small classroom, decorated with inspirational quotes and bright educational paraphernalia. The kids sit at the edge of their seats, waiting in anticipation; they are eager to show their findings after spending an hour researching and putting together a presentation about a quote that Mr. J projected on a whiteboard at the front of the classroom: “The rights of the individual should be the primary object of all governments.” In groups, they were asked to figure out the significance of the quote, using only their critical faculties and a few laptops.

This activity is part of Mr. J’s bi-weekly SOLE session, a freestyle learning period revolving around a topic, quote or question. SOLE, which stands for Self-Organized Learning Environment, is a concept drawn from 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra’s wish in which he offered up a new vision of education that combines the vast resources of the Internet with children’s innate sense of curiosity. The School in the Cloud, as he calls it, is a global experiment in self-organized learning. SOLEs let kids puzzle through big questions and ideas on their own, teaching each other in the process.

More from the TED Prize Blog: Karachi’s youth paint “pictures of peace”

“The biggest thing for me is to prepare my students for the real world, to teach them essential skills such as critical thinking,” says Mr. J, who was inspired to action after watching Mitra’s 2014 TED Talk. “I believe in taking risks. If you’re right all the time you’re not going to learn anything. I believe in pushing my students out of their comfort zones, because that is where the real learning and personal growth happens.”

Mr. J was recently awarded the 2013-2014 New Jersey Governor’s Teacher Recognition Award, given to one teacher at every school in the state. It’s a testament to his popularity among his students. He strikes a precious balance between providing gentle instruction and mentorship, and giving students the freedom to explore on their own. “I’m trying to teach my students how to think. This is a process: learning where to find good, quality  information and determine how relevant it is to the question being posed. How do you boil it all down to a two-minute presentation? This is what I call critical thinking,” he says.

Mr. Jamison holds the “helmet of fate,” an integral part of the weekly SOLE in his 5th grade classroom. Photo: Natasha Scripture

His students are flexible and receptive to working in different ways. “I usually work independently, so for me it is a good opportunity to work in a group,” says Madeline, 11, who admits she was skeptical of the SOLE concept at first. “I like the Internet because you have access to a lot of newer things. In books you can’t get things that are going on, like, yesterday because books take a long time to be written,” she says.

Hadi, 11, also enjoys SOLE sessions. “I like how we get to be independent and collaborate with our friends and talk it out instead of the teacher teaching us,” he says. Hadi, whose favorite subject is math, has his own laptop and plans on being either a doctor or lawyer.

“I think computers are faster and more efficient, especially when you know what you’re doing,” says Natalie, 10, who envisions a career as an architect. She is a big fan of Mr. J. “He is more open to social media and I think that’s very interesting because not a lot of teachers are like that. He is more open to our generation,” she says.

Mr. J knew he wanted to be a teacher since he was a sophomore in high school. His passion for teaching, love of social media and curiosity about educational trends drive him to explore new options like Mitra’s School in the Cloud platform, which helps students conduct research and create presentations. “There is no single formula. Every teacher, every situation is different. I have to set it up in a way that I know is going to work for my kids,” says Mr. J.

More from the TED Prize Blog: Calling documentary filmmakers…

Other adults in the school notice Mr. J’s willingness to try new teaching techniques, and have been experimenting with self-organized learning in their classrooms as well. It is clear that technology is a priority at the school. “This is all about the 21st-century learning,” said David Adam, principal of Lawrence Intermediate School. “We’ve got to get on board now, otherwise our students will be behind.”

Wikipedia and Google are two of the go-to websites for students as they conduct their research, but they are quite adept at navigating their way into less familiar terrain too, clicking on a series of hyperlinks that pull them into offbeat historical websites or down into the bottomless pit of YouTube. As they go, there is a sense of camaraderie and unity. Together, each group decides what snippets of research should feed into their presentation, taking turns using a shared computer. While one clicks on the mouse, another takes notes, and another student perhaps will ponder the meaning of the quote and make a suggestion.

A group of students huddles around as they discuss how to do their presentation. Photo: Natasha Scripture

As each cluster of kids delivers their presentations, the diversity of content is striking — they use multimedia add-ons and offer philosophical musings, memorable for their uniqueness. From finding a quirky, informative, YouTube video where students from another school impersonate Mercy Otis Warren during the American Revolution, to making statements like, “Mr. J gave us this quote because in the olden days women’s opinions never really mattered to people but hers did,” it’s clear that the kids enjoy the limitless creative leverage.

While textbooks are clearly not obsolete, schools like Lawrence Intermediate School are learning to adapt to the impact the Internet is having on students — and figuring out how to take advantage of what it has to offer. In the end, there is no single right way to get kids engaged in learning, but it’s clear that these kids, at least, who are working in a SOLE environment feel a sense of empowerment, confidence and maturity. Perhaps teaching a child to how to think critically is the gift that keeps on giving.

This post originally ran on the TED Prize Blog. Read more » 

Take two education activists with very different theories — and give them a chance to work together on a goal they both care about. That’s the thinking in the video above, the kick-off of Microsoft’s new Work Wonders project, which pairs up unlikely collaborators to spark new ideas. Watch as TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra joins forces with TEDx speaker Adam Braun to tackle a bold mission: Use technology to rethink education in severely underserved communities.

They’re a bit of an odd couple. Mitra, who created the School in the Cloud to enable kids to explore questions that matter to them on their own, believes that traditional schools are becoming more and more obsolete; meanwhile Braun, who founded Pencils of Promise to rally communities in the developing world to build schools, believes that traditional classrooms are the answer to opening up opportunity.

Above, watch the first in a series of mini-docs following this collaboration as it unfolded over the past three months. This episode shows Mitra and Braun meeting for the first time and thinking about how the other’s talents could help strengthen their own vision.

Microsoft, a longtime TED partner, will be revealing more episodes over the next month, so you can join the pair as they explore how to adapt Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) tools for use in three Pencils of Promise schools in Ghana, with the help of Office 365 products and services, and how to build a SOLE starter kit to roll out across Pencils of Promise’s global network. This kit, designed with the needs of underserved communities in mind, could even get distribution far beyond that.

Stay tuned. And in the meantime, watch Mitra’s TED Talk, all about the surprising things that can happen when you give children access to a computer and time to explore:

And check out Braun’s talk from TEDxUNLV about what the American education system can learn from the developing world:

Students in Phaltan, India, research the answer to a big question at one of Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud labs. According to Mitra and his Microsoft Work Wonders Project partner, Adam Braun, there’s quite a bit that Western schools can learn from classrooms in the developing world.

Adam Braun went to school in the US and now runs a nonprofit that builds schools in Ghana, Laos, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In contrast, Sugata Mitra—the winner of the 2013 TED Prize—went to school in India and now is a professor in the UK, where his research on self-directed learning routinely brings him into elementary schools. Both of these education activists have seen how typical classrooms function in the Western world, and both have seen how typical classrooms function in the developing world. And both say, the West isn’t always better.

Braun and Mitra have teamed up through Microsoft’s Work Wonders Project to bring Mitra’s School in the Cloud learning platform into Braun’s Pencils of Promise schools. As the two pilot their partnership in a school in rural Ghana, we got them together via Skype to talk through a bold question: what can the West learn from the developing world when it comes to education? Their conversation is packed with insights.

To start us off, can each of you share three lessons that the developing world can teach the developed world when it comes to education?

Adam Braun: I think that, in the developed world, we tend to assume that we have all the answers and that those will trickle down to the people at the base of the pyramid. But there’s a lot to be learned from unexpected places too. Three things that that our staff and team has observed:

1. In the American education system, the teacher is usually assumed to be the expert. We have this traditional model where one teacher stands in front of 30 kids. But the act of teaching is actually one of the most valuable ways to learn. It’s nice to see environments where children can be teachers. That’s something that Sugata has really expanded on with his Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs), which a lot of times remove the teacher altogether and allow children to learn from one another and teach one another simultaneously.

2. In the United States, there is the expectation that students are supposed to sit still. You’re told not to fidget and to focus. But scientific research shows that brain activity is significantly heightened after 20 minutes of physical activity. There’s significant value in what you see in the developing world—in between classes, kids run in a field, play in a river, climb a mountain. And because they don’t always have proper desks, they’re often learning while sitting on the floor or moving about in the classroom. That can actually lead to better retention and synthesis of information.

3. The third thing is about the way we learn to read. As much as we think of reading as the act of simply turning letters into sounds in our head, literacy is actually the act of conversion of symbol into sound, and that symbol can take several different forms. When we expect kids to learn, we usually activate two different components—the auditory and visual, so they hear things aloud and observe through their eyes. But kids can learn better when you also activate a third plane—the spatial—through things like sign language. We’ve been piloting programs where we have kids create symbols with their hands and it’s leading to phenomenal literacy gains.

Sugata Mitra: Those are such valuable observations. I do hesitate to say, “What can developing countries teach the developed countries about education?” but I would like to frame it as, “What can children teach us about learning?” Because it’s kind of stupid to think that for thousands of years we never asked them. Here are three counterintuitive things that I’ve learned:

1. My first observation, I learned quite accidentally: a reduction in resources brings increased cooperation. It sounds obvious that if there’s one computer and five children, they can fight, in which case nobody gets to do much, or they can come to an agreement about what they want to do. I think it’s very healthy for children to find agreement. That’s a lesson that I brought from India and hesitantly tried in England—and to my absolute delight, it worked exactly the same way, like magic. At first, the kids asked, “Why are you turning computers off?” I said, “You guys are not going to talk if everybody has a computer.” As soon as I did that, the good old hole in the wall from the slums of Delhi suddenly appeared in the U.S. and U.K. with exactly the same results.
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2. The act of cooperating around the Internet amplifies reading comprehension. Reading has always been taught as a one-to-one thing. With reading on paper, it isn’t easy to read together, whereas on a nice, big computer screen, you can. When children do that, they learn to read adult-level text as a result. People sometimes don’t believe me. They say, “How could they possibly read the Harvard Business Review and understand anything?” To which my answer is, “I don’t know, but they seem to understand it.” Now, I’m measuring this, and have a couple of students who are studying it too. It’s a very exciting finding, and one that could be very relevant in the United States, where reading comprehension is a problem. If this works, it could be a simple solution. I mean, what can be simpler than saying, “Shut down a few computers and read together.”
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3. The third thing is just what Adam said: children in classrooms in the developing world move around a lot because they’re not being supervised. They run about, they disturb each other, they do all the things you’re not supposed to do inside a classroom—but the results are good. I was in a school in London, doing a SOLE with 9-year olds, and they were making a tremendous amount of noise. At the end of it, I asked, “Weren’t you disturbed by all the noise?” One little girl said, “When I hear the voices of my friends, I feel relaxed.” That was a revelation—I had never thought of that. She was concentrating better because she heard voices around her. It was actually aiding the learning process.

All of these observations are so interesting. Let’s start with one Sugata mentioned: that a reduction in resources can lead to more cooperation. Adam, is that something that you’ve seen?

Adam Braun: I definitely agree with that idea. As an entrepreneur, I think a lot from a business standpoint and time and time again, the most effective exercises in the manifestation of ideas happens when you limit resources. It’s common practice in off-site exercises for people to be given limited resources and be told, “Okay, go solve this problem.” You see unexpected, innovation solutions emerge. I think that applies to the learning process as well.

Sugata Mitra: You got me thinking about an activity that’s very popular with children in India: airplanes. In the cities, children can buy perfect scale models of airplanes to play with. But in the villages and the slums, the children make an airplane out of two ice cream sticks. Isn’t that far more creative and imaginative?

In School in the Cloud classrooms, are there other resources in the room besides computer stations, or do you keep it scaled down to those to get that cooperation effect?

Sugata Mitra: The most prominent equipment in the room are the computers—there are usually six or seven of them with good, high-definition, large screens. In two of the schools, I also installed Xboxes. The teachers thought I was out of my mind. They said, “The kids are not going to do anything besides play with the Xbox.” But I think there’s another way to look at it: If they’re playing all the time, that means that whatever we’ve asked them to do is not as interesting as the Xbox. In which case, we’d better rethink the tasks that we’re asking them to do. We tried an experiment—I gave the students a really nice SOLE question and they got to working, and I purposely said, “Oh, by the way, there’s an Xbox.” As the teacher predicted, everybody started playing. But there were three little boys who were busily working on the question. I went up to them and said, “I’ve got a serious problem. If everyone keeps playing with the Xbox, my SOLE isn’t going to happen properly. Can you help me?” One of these kids got up, went straight to the Xbox, stood in front of the screen, and said, “We are in the middle of an important educational experiment. Do you guys mind getting back to work?” And you know what—the other kids listened.

That’s interesting—they started playing teacher. Adam, you’d mentioned earlier the importance of kids getting the chance to teach. Is that something you see happening frequently in classrooms in the developing world?

Adam Braun: You see it a tremendous amount. Even outside the classroom, it’s just in the way of life. Increasingly in Western culture, parents feel protective of their kids, so there’s constantly this need for an adult to be around and, with the competition for colleges and whatnot, kids have multiple layers of teachers—once they leave the school, they have the tutor, then once they’re done with the tutor, they work with the parent. It’s rare for one child to teach another child. And yet in the developing world, what you see is that the parents go out, spend the day in the field, and the kids are kind of left to their own devices. Oftentimes, it’s expected that the older children will look after the younger children. It’s part of the norm of the culture. I think that the learner is able to relate better, because they’re closer to a peer and they see the world with the same lens. And the child who is teaching develops an advanced sense of responsibility and a mastery of whatever content they’re teaching because, as I think we all know, you can’t teach something unless you know it intimately. I’ve seen this in dozens of countries.

Sugata Mitra: I see it all the time in India as well, the children having to mind each other. I want to add one thing, Adam, which might interest you. There’s one situation where a child becoming the teacher doesn’t work: in the classroom itself. If you take a classroom and say, “Okay, Adam is the teacher,” what many children do is they get a stick and they hold it up and they say, “Everybody sit quietly. I don’t want a single word to be spoken.” The child’s idea of what a teacher is comes from that military, colonial background. But when they’re in the field or the house and the parents are not there, then they help each other. If you ask them, they’ll say, “I’m helping him tie his shoelaces.” They won’t say, “I’m teaching him to tie his shoelaces.” I think there’s a huge difference between the two. What both Adam and I are talking about as an alternative to what’s currently going on in schools—the whole idea of converting “teaching” into “helping you learn.” If that were the ethos, I think children would learn a lot better.

Is there a difference in attitude about going to school? I feel like in the United States, there was always a sense of, “School is something we have to do.” Not of it being something exciting or a real opportunity. Is that different in India, Ghana, and other countries you’ve seen?

Sugata Mitra: In India, it’s exactly the same. The children are reluctant—they have gloomy faces in the morning. If you really probe, they say they don’t quite understand why they’re going to school except to see their friends—that’s the big delight. It’s not that they don’t want to learn things, it’s just that they are not given an option to learn it their way. They’re told to learn in a particular way, and I think that’s the reason why all of us in the morning used to feel a little glum. We knew we would be told to sit quietly, take notes, memorize things, and we also knew that these are not fun things to do.

Adam Braun: I’ve seen all sides of the spectrum. I’ve seen communities where education is just not a high priority; part of that might be that the parents themselves weren’t educated. They have never really seen the benefits that can be accrued, and they have more pressing daily concerns. More often than not, the kids’ attitudes stem from the attitude of the surrounding community. It takes a catalyst to ignite some type of commitment—that can come from a parent, an engaged teacher in the town, a grandparent, a village chief, an older sibling. Once that child feels like they’re supported in this endeavor, things just take off. When you see a catalyst in the community, you tend to see far greater commitment to education and the opportunities that it provides. I think that applies to kids in the Western world too.

Sugata Mitra: There are self-motivated children. By about 11, 12, 13 years of age, you find—in India and the U.K., certainly—children who say, “I must do well in school so that I can become an engineer.” But for the 6-year-olds and 7-year-olds, that goal is too far away. They think of school as a place where they teach things; and, most of the time, they don’t like the way in which it is taught. So I think parents and other adults telling the child, “You have to go to school,” may not be the right approach. If school could be exciting—if the school had an Xbox, for example—I think it wouldn’t be that difficult to get children to want to go. In the hole-in-the-wall experiment, parents used to complain to me that their children weren’t coming home. I was thinking to myself, “These are the same children who hate going to school, but they’re not coming back from their roadside computer. What’s the difference?” The difference was the freedom to learn their way.

Are there any skills, habits or abilities that you’ve seen in students in India and Ghana that would be useful for students in the Western world to learn?

Sugata Mitra: We just did an experiment together, which you can see in the video above, where we had children of similar ages in Ghana and the United States answer the same question—“Why is the blue whale so big?”—in a Self-Organized Learning Environment. We got nearly identical results. Which I think that is a lesson in itself: when it comes to motivated, self-directed learning, children really are not different from country to country. That is terrific news. We don’t have to think of different solutions for different socio-economic strata. If we do it right, then children will engage in the same way, whether it’s in the United States or in Ghana.

Adam Braun: There’s one basic thing I’ve seen that’s different in students in the developing world: resilience. It’s not to say you don’t see it in Western culture, but students in the developing world face significantly more potential obstacles than most kids in the Western world. There are so many hurdles to becoming a university student when you start out living in a bamboo hut without running water, when nobody in your family has even completed secondary school before. It requires a tremendous amount of resilience to get to the point where you graduate. In the developing world, I think there is an appreciation for the difficulties of the journey. Because of that, there’s an expectation that, once someone succeeds, that they give back to their community in some capacity. I hope that continues—and it’s something that would be very beneficial to Western culture as well. Right now, we have this romanticizing of the person who goes off and leaves behind where they came from, but it’s really beautiful and powerful to see that in the developing world, even if a person doesn’t move back to the community, they find a way to help lift others out of impoverished situations. I don’t want to say it doesn’t happen in Western culture, but it’s something that I see happen consistently in the developing world.

Sugata Mitra: I’ve spent most of my life in India; it’s only the last eight or nine years that I’ve been outside. The sentiment that Adam’s describing—that’s the first thing that I saw missing in Western society. I wondered why, but there is a very simple answer: because there isn’t a shortage. If you take a young man or woman who is earning good money, they think, “My parents are okay—I don’t really need to send them money.” And they are correct. But in a way, it’s very ironic. Young people eventually stop aspiring. What Adam is saying, very politely, is that poverty drives a certain value system—a good value system—but poverty is not a nice thing, so we have to invent a new way to have that value system without the actual poverty.

Students at the Omega School in Ghana talk to Adam Braun and Sugata Mitra remotely. Through Microsoft’s Work Wonders Project, Pencils of Promise and the School in the Cloud are teaming up to develop a new model of education.

What is a lesson that each of you has personally learned from a student you’ve met in India, Ghana, or another country?

Adam Braun: I remember very distinctly being in a multiple-acre dump in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It’s a horrific, hellish place that’s pretty devastating to see—communities live on the edge of it and they send the kids out to collect sacks of hard plastic from the garbage, for which they can get something like 10 or 15 cents. When I was 21 years old, I got involved with an organization called the Cambodian Children’s Fund, which took kids out of that situation and put them into a facility that provided quality food, healthcare, and a full education. I went back at one point and I was walking around the outskirts of this dump and I found this kid who was living there. I asked him and his friend what they wanted to be when they grew up. They couldn’t have been more than 10 years old; they’re garbage pickers. And one of them looked at me and said he wanted to be a lawyer, and the other one said he wanted to be the Prime Minister. I remember being so awestruck by the size of these kids’ dreams. As adults, particularly adults from the Western world, we have this expectation that kids understand the limits of their situation and that, because of that, they’ll be inhibited in how big they dream. But these kids were very serious. They weren’t willing to limit themselves to the confines of the situation they were in at that moment. That was an immense lesson that always stuck with me. When you hear a child in a situation like that say they want to be the head of their country, it’s extraordinarily humbling and motivating and inspiring at the same time.

Sugata Mitra: The lesson I want to share is of a completely different kind. I learned it from a child who was about 5 years old in the United States. He was being taught how to multiply—to write down two digit numbers, one below the other, and then you do this and that. I was chatting with him and I asked, “Why are you struggling with multiplying?” Without batting an eyelid, he said, “Because I could use a phone. Why do I have to multiply numbers like that on a piece of paper?” He was really annoyed. And at that moment, I realized something important: that the answer to his question was, “They are wasting your time.” I gave a lecture a couple of days later, and I brought this up. I said, “Maybe it’s time we stopped teaching paper arithmetic.” And boy, that community of teachers erupted—they could have killed me. “How can you not have arithmetic? It’s a pillar of primary education.” But who is primary education for? Five-year olds and six-year olds. And there’s my 5-year old friend, who was so extraordinarily annoyed by it. I learned a lot from that conversation with him.

It is still early days for your collaboration, but could you give an update on where things are with bringing SOLEs into Pencils of Promise schools? 

Sugata Mitra: We’re moving this project forward. This is where our meeting ground is: the SOLE as a method is effective and inexpensive, because it works best with just a few computers. So if we take the SOLE idea into Adam’s school and restructure a little bit, then we would get a new kind of model for a school, which others may want to look at. Where Adam’s work is invaluable to me is that his schools—and he has made a lot of them—are currently up and running whereas my holes in the wall are not. I have not been able to solve the problem of sustainability, and I want to find some of the right techniques to get it. It will be exciting to see where we can go together. It should be a few months before the first one or two start to function.

Adam Braun: Leslie Engle is our Director of Impact and she’s been working with a gentleman on Sugata’s side to formalize what this program can look like. We’re excited to find a middle ground in which our commitment and experience with building sustainable schools can mesh with Sugata’s brilliance around SOLEs, and to bring it to life on the ground. Obviously it takes time and it takes iteration and it takes willingness to put forward new ideas. But we’re both committed to it and I’m excited to see where it develops through the rest of the year.

Sugata Mitra: It’s interesting—with the Schools in the Cloud program that I’m doing, my biggest problem, surprisingly, is not pedagogy, or student engagement. My biggest problem is getting quality Internet connections and quality electricity—not having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on solar energy, only to have it not function properly. We need equipment that is designed for the tropics. If you design a pair of shoes to work in New York City and then take it to the paddy fields of Vietnam, in an hour, there will be no shoe left. But if you’ve designed a shoe that works in the paddy fields of Vietnam, that will work forever in New York City. I think that if Adam takes his model, builds it and then brings it out of Africa, we’ll get a model of education that works everywhere.

Adam Braun: I would like to echo that. The most sustainable projects and products are those that are built in challenging environments. That’s an exciting place for us to be, knowing that we have the ability and the staff and the relationships to actually do something on the ground. The hope is that if it works out there, then we can expand it and it can propagate across various other parts of the world.

Kids at a school in India gather around a computer as David Swancott leads a School in the Cloud session.

David Swancott is a retired biology teacher who lives an hour southeast of Bordeaux, France. He spends his free time bicycling, traveling and, for the past two years, being a “Skype Granny.” Swancott is a part of the “Granny Cloud,” a project created by 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra to make teachers available online to mentor children participating in his School in the Cloud. As children explore the big questions that matter to them, they get nudges in the right direction from a Skype Granny. But don’t let the name fool you. While many Granny Cloud participants are female and retired, just as many are male or in their 20s, 30s and 40s.

Now that the school year is underway, the TED Prize Blog checked in with one of our male grannies to ask about his experience mentoring kids through the Granny Cloud.

You’re retired, living in the countryside. What inspired you to become a Skype Granny for School in the Cloud?

I found out about it on television—on the BBC’s The One Show, which follows the evening news. They did a segment about the Granny Cloud, and it stirred my interest. I thought, “That’s something I might like to be involved with.” I missed being in contact with children. So I got in touch with the contact provided on the show’s website, downloaded an application form and, after an interview and orientation, I became a Skype Granny. Once a teacher, always a teacher.

Every Tuesday morning, you Skype with young students at two different schools in India. Can you talk us through a typical session?

Last week, one group came on and immediately wanted to know about butterflies. So as time was tight, I quickly hunted out a National Geographic video on the monarch butterfly and we watched that. Afterwards, we talked through what they’d seen. I asked questions and together we explored the life cycle of a butterfly.

Sessions last between 30 and 45 minutes. We usually start by spending some time talking about the things that have happened during the week, then I show them some photos or a video or written material, usually on a topic they decided on the week before. We spend time talking about the material. I try to get them to input as much as possible — picking out new vocabulary, checking spelling and so on.

You’re the grandfather of two young boys and taught high school in England for more than 40 years, which means you must be very patient. What are some challenges you’ve come across being a Skype Granny?

Well, you have to think on your feet a bit sometimes and be willing to move with the children if they go off on a tangent. Quite often, there are problems with sound or vision or even both, and we have to resort to communication by text. There’s also no guarantee that the Internet will work at all, as the facilities in some areas are so poor. On one occasion, the line to the school was attacked by monkeys and it took a while for it to be repaired, as the school is in a very remote area.

Another School in the Cloud session, with kids gathered around a computer.

What’s the best thing about being a Skype Granny?

The children’s enthusiasm, their willingness to learn and their appreciation of my involvement as a granny. Recently, I’ve been experiencing some heart problems and when I re-started the sessions after my illness, the children at one of the schools had made these lovely “Get Well Soon” cards for me, which they were able to show to me during one of our sessions. What a tonic that was! And, unlike some of the children in England, when they see you, they smile. They are happy to be there. And they have a contagious enthusiasm, which I think is what keeps me going and makes me want to do more for them.

What do you think makes a good teacher?

Teaching is about creating and providing a supportive environment in which a child can learn. A good teacher acts as a facilitator for that child’s learning. The UK government started fiddling around with education, and that’s one of the things that drove me away from teaching – we moved to a very prescribed curriculum with little or no time to drift sideways and explore other facets of a subject or respond to students’ questions or thoughts. The school’s examination results became the most important thing, but it’s much more than that! Overall, I think a good teacher must be able to work within the constraints of the existing system, have an enthusiasm for their subject, and be able to engage students and get them involved with their own learning.

What do you think is the future of learning?

The use of technology in schools is changing the way we learn, what we learn, and what the shape of the curriculum should be in the future. I was a teacher during an era when computers first appeared in schools — to be used by teachers, certainly not for students. Now in many schools, the students all have their own computers or tablets. I never envisaged being able to communicate with a school in India on a regular basis, and now look what I am doing! Technology opens up many opportunities for different approaches to learning. Within this, children need to be allowed to take more charge of their learning, with the teacher acting in a more supporting role. Letting go, allowing this to happen, is a big challenge for teachers, as there is security when you are setting out the agenda. But really, this approach doesn’t take anything away from the role of the teacher. We will continue to be instrumental in setting up these learning situations.

Learn more about becoming a Skype Granny »

Find out more about Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize wish »

Students at a School in the Cloud lab in India investigate a big question on their own in a SOLE. At the newly-opened SOLE Central at Newcastle University, research will be conducted on this type of learning. Photo: School in the Cloud

Picture a classroom teacher without a lesson plan — a teacher who instead asks students an open-ended question to explore: Can animals think? Did dinosaurs exist? What is a soul?

With the opening of Newcastle University’s SOLE Central on Monday, this vision is coming to life, in a research center where the concept can be tweaked and improved as it rolls out to the wider world.

SOLE Central is the first global hub for research into self-organized learning environments (SOLEs) – the style of learning championed by TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra. In his 2013 prize-winning wish, Mitra offered up a vision of education that combines the resources of the Internet with a child’s own sense of curiosity. The School in the Cloud, as he calls it, is a global experiment where kids puzzle through big questions and ideas on their own with minimal assistance, teaching one another in the process. Mitra’s SOLE concept is being piloted at seven School in the Cloud labs in the UK and India, and SOLE Central will build on this, bringing together academic researchers, educators, policymakers and entrepreneurs to help test this concept as a model for primary education.

Mitra will serve as the Director of SOLE Central. His initial research suggests that children in SOLE environments can learn almost anything by themselves and that they truly absorb the subjects they research – often years ahead of their age group. But more research needs to be conducted, recorded and housed in one place. This is the reasoning behind SOLE Central at Newcastle.

Sugata Mitra looks dreamily in the distance at the opening of SOLE Central. Photo: Alexander Wilson/Zander Photography

“SOLE Central will enable us to make a valuable contribution to the education of children worldwide,” says Newcastle University Vice-Chancellor Chris Brink. “It will make a lasting legacy of what Sugata has started.”

James Stanfield, the director of the School in the Cloud project, played a major role in setting up SOLE Central. As he says: “While we love the no-nonsense approach of educators and practitioners who are just getting on and doing it, we also recognize the need to better understand the impact of SOLEs on children’s learning and development over time and how this differs in different contexts around the world. The new research center will allow us to catch up, so that the research continuously feeds into and informs practice, and vice versa.”

SOLE Central will host Ph.D. students exploring a range of subjects, including the impact of SOLEs on reading comprehension in schools in New York and the potential of SOLEs to improve learning after school. Researchers here will use sensors to observe students’ activity on computers, and look at the kinds of architecture that maximize self-organized learning. Other researchers have expressed interest in looking at self-organization in the work environment.

Data used for analysis at SOLE Central will come from the School in the Cloud project, as well as from collaborations with partners like Microsoft and Pencils of Promise. In all, this new research center represents an important step forward. Because, as Mitra puts it, “SOLEs are the first step towards preparing our children for a future we can barely imagine.”

Find out more about Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize wish »

Find out how you can bring SOLEs to your community with our SOLE toolkit and resources »

Read more about TED Prize wishes »

This building is known as Area Zero. Located in West Bengal, India, it is the final — and flagship — lab of Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud.

You’ve probably heard of Area 51. But how about Area Zero?

Area Zero is the flagship center of Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud, the idea that won him the 2013 TED Prize. It’s the final of Mitra’s labs dedicated to self-organized learning, and it opened this morning in Gocharan in West Bengal, India. A solar-powered building with large glass windows, Area Zero is set among palm trees, with ponds and verandahs on either side. But while the design is sophisticated, the building is for kids. About 120 arrived for today’s opening and quickly let loose on the facility’s computers.

See, Area Zero isn’t a traditional school. Rather than sitting through lectures from a teacher, students in this lab will learn by exploring big questions on the Internet on their own. They will both learn from and teach their peers, as they receive light guidance from an encouraging mentor. Above all, they will get to learn their way. 

Sugata Mitra has a group of students show him what they are working on.

“My objective for the flagship center is for children to learn and engage — while also examining and documenting the advantage of self-organized learning environments [SOLEs],” says Mitra. “Area Zero is the first facility of its kind, and I’m proud to bring it home to India.” 

Mitra has opened six other School in the Cloud labs — two in the United Kingdom and four in different parts of India, as well as a research center called SOLE Central at Newcastle University, where he a professor of educational technology. But Area Zero is the grandest of these labs. Within its sleek building, it has a dozen computers and will accommodate 48 children at a time — a perfect ratio, as this learning method has kids work in groups of four. Sessions at Area Zero will cost 10 rupees, a low price so that most families in the area can afford to send their kids.

While too many children arrived for the opening to hold a proper SOLE session, students did get a chance to work together in groups and learn. Suneeta Kulkarni, Research Director of the School in the Cloud, was on-hand and tells us, “They managed to work out Paint on their own. Within 30 minutes, they were drawing trees and mountains. After accidentally using the eraser tool, they realized that they could undo something and still have a picture. It was fun to watch.”

Students excitedly figure out how to use Paint.

 Area Zero itself has an unusual shape: its walls form a hexagon. This is meaningful to Mitra, as the hexagon represents the chemical compound benzene and also mimics the basic structure of honeycomb.

“How bees create honeycomb is one of the best examples of a self-organized environment in nature,” says Mitra. “A single bee has no knowledge at all about how it works or comes together, but as a hive they can create this phenomenal structure. And the benzene ring is the basis of all organic life — without it there would be no life at all. I hope this symbolism inspires limitless learning in the lab.”

But even those who’ll never see this lab are welcome to take part in Mitra’s TED Prize Wish. Shortly after announcing his wish at TED2013, Mitra released a SOLE toolkit that has been downloaded more than 67,000 times. More recently, he launched a digital School in the Cloud platform which lets students and classrooms around the world take part in this freeform learning style, under the guidance of mentors called “Skype Grannies.”

A view of Area One’s hexagonal shape, as it was under construction.

So what, exactly, is up with the name Area Zero? Mitra gave each of the School in the Cloud labs a numerical name based on the socioeconomics of its location — Areas One and Two are located in poorer communities in India and Areas Five and Six are in the United Kingdom servicing better-off communities. These diverse labs will provide a cross-section of data for Mitra and his team to analyze, and will allow them draw conclusions about how to tailor School in the Cloud programs to local communities. Area Zero is located in the highest-need community. And while it was the last of the labs to be built, it was actually the first of them to be imagined. Mitra sketched the hexagonal shape back in November of 2012, in one of his initial TED Prize planning meetings.

“I am incredibly excited to see this vision come to life,” says Mitra.

The crowd that gathered for the opening of Area Zero.

At SOLE NYC, the first School in the Cloud learning lab in the US, students work in groups to answer fun, open-ended questions. On Wednesday morning, students researched: why do dogs chase cats? The assignment had them looking at cat photos online. Photo: Dian Lofton/TED

On Wednesday morning at John B. Russwurm Elementary School in Harlem, students pointed excitedly at cat photos on the Internet. No, they weren’t goofing off. They were participating in a “self organized learning environment,” or SOLE, a teaching method where kids are given an open-ended, curiosity-stroking question and asked to research it in small groups.

This morning’s question: Why do dogs chase cats? The students laughed and debated as they discovered new insights online. With markers uncapped, they laid down on the floor and discussed how to present what they’d learned to the rest of the class.

Students at Russwurm Elementary have done SOLEs before, but the session on October 14 was a special one. It took place in a new classroom called SOLE NYC. This bright, airy space — decorated with jungle wallpaper and monkeys, with felt clouds dangling from the ceiling — is the first School in the Cloud learning lab in the United States. It joins five School in the Cloud labs in India and two in the UK as the eighth space designed specifically for SOLEs.

Third and fifth grade classes at Russwurm Elementary will each go into the lab once a week to investigate a new question — some picked by teachers and some picked by kids. Meanwhile, fourth graders will use the lab daily to answer science questions like: “What would happen if there were no insects?” and “Can you use a compass in space?”

“The more I watch,” said school principal Natasha Spann, “the more I see how much they can learn from it.”

This unconventional way of teaching is the invention of education innovator Sugata Mitra, the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. With the $1 million prize, Mitra started opening School in the Cloud learning labs and launched an online platform to let educators hold SOLEs anywhere in the world with Internet access. Mitra flew from his homebase at Newcastle University in the UK to attend the opening of SOLE NYC, and to celebrate the School in the Cloud’s arrival in the US.

Students at SOLE NYC in Harlem raised their hands to ask questions of 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra (center). They wanted to know old he is, and how he convinced his boss to let him put a computer outside in the middle of a New Delhi slum. Photo: Dian Lofton/TED

On Wednesday morning, Mitra led the students as they researched why dogs chase cats. “You can talk as much as you like,” he said. “You can look at other people’s work.”

The idea behind SOLEs is to move past memorization, and help students think critically, find information and ask big questions. As the six groups in the room presented what they found, Mitra pointed out the differences in how the groups thought about the question. One group noted that dogs chase cats for play – and that it only becomes dangerous when a cat gets annoyed and bites or scratches. Another group highlighted the typical size differential between the two animals. Another focused on how dogs don’t always chase cats but that, often, the two coexist peacefully.

“Asking why dogs chase cats is like asking, ‘Which came first: the chicken or the egg?’” said a student from another group. “It’s instinctual.”

Mitra lit up. “There’s something important here,” he said. “This is the first group that’s looked to explain why dogs chase cats. They suggest that dogs may be hardwired by history for this behavior.”

As the SOLE wrapped up, Mitra continued talking with the students. They wanted to know about his Hole in the Wall experiment, where he placed a computer in the wall of a slum in New Delhi, India, and was astonished to find that the kids learned to use it on their own.

“How did you make the Hole in the Wall experiment?” one student asked.

“I had to convince my boss to give me money to put a computer outside. He thought it was a waste,” said Mitra. “But companies waste a lot of money, so I said, ‘Why not waste a little more?’”

Another student wanted to know how he picked questions for SOLEs. “Do you always know the answer?” she asked.

“No,” said Mitra. “I didn’t know today. Now we all know.”

The SOLE NYC learning lab is filled with dot carpets, where students sit as they’re given a question to explore. In a ring around the outside of the room, they can congregate at six computers with large screens. Photo: Dian Lofton/TED

Normally, “Skype Granny” Lesley Keast  lives in Spain and appears as a giant face on a screen in the School in the Cloud learning lab in Gocharan, India. But in the days before the first-ever School in the Cloud conference, she got a chance to visit the lab and meet the students she’d been mentoring from afar. Photo: Sarah Schoengold

“Let’s skip ahead and assume that children of the future are always connected,” said education innovator Sugata Mitra. Thinking out loud about the evolution of screen sizes and the future of wearables, he came to the conclusion: “The Internet is a subject as important as science or mathematics.”

Mitra shared this in a presentation at the first-ever School in the Cloud conference, held in India last February. The conference brought together those who’ve been a part of the education initiative — which encourages kids to explore interesting questions online — since Mitra founded it with the 2013 TED Prize. The school now consists of eight learning labs in India, the UK and US, and an online platform that lets students anywhere participate with the help of retired educators who guide sessions over the cloud. In the five days before the conference, 15 of these “Skype Grannies” gathered to tour four labs in India with Mitra. Traveling by plane, boat and rickshaw, they got a chance to meet the students they’d been working with face-to-face. By coincidence, the tour took place on the eve of the Saraswati Puja festival, which celebrates the Hindu goddess of learning.

In his presentation at the conference, Mitra shared four stories from the tour — each from a different lab, and each centered around a question that pushed attendees to think about the future of education. Below, the stories and the questions they illustrate.

Is learning to read a form of problem-solving?
From “Area One” in Korakati, West Bengal

In Korakati, the most remote of the School in the Cloud labs, deep in a mangrove swamp, Sugata observed a young boy who knew the English alphabet, but didn’t know how to read or speak English. The boy had watched three older kids playing a game, and wanted to try it on another computer in the lab. So he copied the letters of the web address down on a piece of paper, and searched the keyboard carefully to be able to type the letters. Soon, about six children gathered around him to play the game too.

At first glance, this boy was only playing a computer game. But upon closer inspection, he acted on personal initiative, and solved a big problem in order to make the technology work for him. What this boy did is not reading — but it is learning. This kind of creativity should be rewarded, too, says Mitra.

Does learning have to be direct, or can it meander?
From “Area Two” in Chandrakona, West Bengal

The Chandrakona lab is nestled within potato fields in rural West Bengal. Here, a granny showed four boys a volcano experiment on YouTube that involved baking soda and vinegar. Because of connectivity issues, the boys wanted to download the video, to access in case they lost their connection. But there was a problem: they didn’t know how to download a YouTube video.

One of the boys suggested asking the computer itself. After a bit of Googling, they found a video on how to download YouTube videos. But watching the video required downloading free software, which required an email address. The group was stumped again — none of the boys had email.

Working together, the boys learned how to create a fake email address. They downloaded the software. Then watched the video. And finally, downloaded the volcano experiment video. By working as a team and going step-by-step, says Mitra, they learned so much in addition to the science behind a chemical reaction.

A group of Skype Grannies toured four School in the Cloud learning labs in India with TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra. Many of the moments they witnessed became stories that Mitra shared in his keynote presentation at the School in the Cloud conference. Photo: Sarah Schoengold

How do peers spark each other to learn?
From “Area Zero” in Gocharan, West Bengal

“Area Zero” is the School in the Cloud’s flagship TED Prize lab — a sleek, solar-powered learning lab set amid palm trees. There, a boy demonstrated an interactive computer program that he’d taught himself to code — a “chatbot” that lets the computer carry on basic conversations in English. At the program’s prompting, Mitra typed in his name. “Hi Sugata,” the computer responded. The computer asked where he lives, and Mitra asked the same of the program. “I live in Gocharan, inside a computer,” the chatbot answered.

The program piqued the interest of several younger children at the lab, and sparked several to experiment with coding on their own. This made coding a focus of their School in the Cloud sessions. Mitra points out that no one had to plan lessons to teach the topic. Instead, the kids were so inspired, they felt compelled to teach themselves.

What can students learn from teaching?
From “Area Four” in Phaltan, Maharashtra

In the bustling city of Phaltan, the School in the Cloud lab sits within a traditional school, and kids participate in a session each week. Here, a group of students puzzled over a hard question, not quite finding what they needed online. When a group of older students walked by an open window, the younger students asked for their help. The older kids jumped in. But instead of showing the younger kids where to look, the older students employed “the Granny method,” and provided encouragement as the children circled in on a promising direction themselves.

The younger students learned about the problem at hand, says Mitra, but the older children learned too. They got an active lesson in how to give guidance, and sharpened their own skills for locating information.

Mitra’s point in telling these four stories: Traditional education is based on testing and assessment, but many things that have a big impact on children aren’t easily measured. The School in the Cloud pushes education toward something more thematic and fluid. Mitra describes it as “learning at the edge of chaos,” and measuring chaos — or curiosity, for that matter — is no easy task.

When these students at the School in the Cloud lab in Phaltan, India, felt stumped on a question, a group of older students popped their heads through a window and offered encouragement. Photo: Sarah Schoengold

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SOLE Colombia teaches digital literacy to kids in rural communities across the country, giving them big questions to research in groups. Photo: Courtesy of SOLE Colombia

In Kingston, Jamaica, 4- to 6-year-olds in early education programs think about questions like, “What does it mean to be selfish?” In a school on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, fifth graders research topics like, “What is WordPress?” In rural Colombia, students at local libraries puzzle over prompts like, “Why are yawns contagious?”

The School in the Cloud, founded by education innovator Sugata Mitra with the 2013 TED Prize, asks students to follow their curiosity as they research big questions online. The tech-forward school has five official learning labs in India and two in the UK — plus partner programs scattered around the world, where educators use its online platform to run Self-Organized Learning Environments, or SOLEs. For the first time, ten of these partner programs have teamed up for a Crowdrise campaign, to raise money for equipment and growth. SOLE Pakistan has raised more than $3,000; SOLE Colombia more than $2,000; and SOLE Jamaica more than $1,500.

At Khud in Lahore, Pakistan, students learn to use computers — and give compelling presentations. Photo: Courtesy of Khud

Salahuddin Khawaja, who runs SOLE Pakistan (known as Khud), says that School in the Cloud fills a void in his country. “Pakistan’s education system is in crisis. More than a million teachers are needed,” he said. “SOLE sessions empower kids by developing their 21st-century skills. They’re equipping themselves with knowledge of computers, presentations and video editing.”

Rondeen McLean of SOLE Jamaica wants to buy 65 computers to brings SOLE sessions to 13 more early-childhood education programs in underserved communities. “Working with our first 100 students, we’ve observed sharper critical-thinking skills and real development as independent readers,” she said.

At School in the Cloud’s Area 4 lab in Phaltan, India, students who’ve never used computers before quickly build skills. Photo: Courtesy of School in the Cloud

Sanjay Fernandes of SOLE Colombia is fundraising to take SOLE sessions on the road. “We’re a small group of education and tech enthusiasts, and we want to take SOLE to all the corners of this country,” he said. “In rural areas in Colombia, the government has spent a lot of money setting up computers and connectivity in public places like libraries, kiosks and schools. We’ve convinced them to use SOLE as a method to get people of all ages using them. We’ve been to 300 places so far.”

Other partners participating in the campaign: SOLE Spain, SOLE Mexico, SOLE Argentina, SOLE India, SOLE Phaltan, SOLE Greece and SOLE-NYC. Learn more at the School in the Cloud Crowdrise campaign.

At SOLE-NYC, a lab inside a public school in Harlem, students join in SOLE sessions once a week. Photo: Dian Lofton/TED

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At the School in the Cloud learning lab in the village of Korakati, India, students sit on colorful stools in front of computer screens, talking over Skype to educators in England and Germany. So it might be surprising to discover that this high-tech education center was built in a place that can only be accessed by boat and rickshaw, where electricity was sparse and Internet connectivity did not previously exist.

The School in the Cloud, a new documentary by filmmaker Jerry Rothwell that premiered today at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival, CPH:Dox, tells the story behind the construction of this unlikely lab. The brainchild of 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra, this lab got its start when a landowner in the village contacted Mitra and offered a plot of land to build a center in Korakati, where there isn’t much development or educational opportunity. The film, which was funded in part with the Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award, traces the development of lab from an early site visit where Mitra sketches out the building in his notebook, through to three years into the lab’s operation, when it has already changed the lives of its young students in unpredictable ways.

Rothwell has been following Mitra ever since he spoke at TED2013 and shared his TED Prize wish: to redefine the future of learning by building the School in the Cloud, a platform and network of learning labs where students are encouraged to explore big questions. At a panel before the premiere, Mitra was joined onstage by Rothwell, TED Prize Director Anna Verghese, and CPH:Dox curator Lars Torp. In the conversation, Mitra shared that data he’s collected on the School in the Cloud shows rapid improvement in reading comprehension and reported well-being of students — something visible in the footage captured in Korakati. Mitra also shared that he considers the Korakati lab — the most remote of the eight launched so far — the most successful. The thing that’s made it thrive despite Internet outages and other challenges: the community’s continued investment and pride in it.

The School in the Cloud will be available to a wider audience later this year. Stay tuned for information on how to watch.