Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education – the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave children self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionise how we think about teaching.

Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest.

Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in maths and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script – give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

In 2004, Salman Khan, a hedge fund analyst, began posting math tutorials on YouTube. Six years later, he has posted more than 2.000 tutorials, which are viewed nearly 100,000 times around the world each day.