EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE Assignment 3- Research Paper on an Emerging Trend/Issue

By Krystal Alexander (02606876)

A Paper Presented in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements of EDID6506 Issues, Trends, Innovations and Research in Instructional Design, Instructional Technology and Distance Education Trimester III, 2013

Email: University: eTutor: Course Coordinator

krystal.alexander2@my.open.uwi.edu University of the West Indies Open Campus Dr. Camille Dickson-Deane Dr. Camille Dickson-Deane

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE

This paper seeks to highlight The School in the Cloud which is an emerging trend in the fields of instructional design, technology and/or distance education. The initiator of this trend, evidence of artefacts, its relevance to the above-mentioned fields and examples of potential use, will be highlighted. The latter part of the paper entails the writers reflection on the research process. The School in the Cloud is an initiative of educational researcher Dr. Sugata Mitra. Dr. Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England. He is Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at NIIT Limited. Due to his contributions to the fields of education and instructional technology, he is the winner of the TED Prize 2013. The $1 million TED Prize is seed money which will go towards funding this emerging trend, the School in the Cloud, in India and the UK. This school will serve as both an education and research centre to further explore approaches to self-directed learning. It will be managed by cloud technology, but with an adult supervisor always on hand (Torgovnick, 2013) The School in the Cloud emerged out of Mitras experiments known as the Hole in the Wall experiments which started in 1999. Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was children from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other. He repeated the experiment 300 miles away, where computers were even less familiar. He installed a mysterious computer on the side of a road. A few months later, he returned and found children playing games on it.

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE Mitra kept testing, seeing if rural students could learn different pronunciation simply by

talking into a speech-to-text engine until it understood them. They did it. And then he went even further. He asked: Can Tamil-speaking 12-year-olds learn the biotech of DNA replication by themselves on a street-side computer in English? Over months, the children began to learn the material, showing understanding of concepts far advanced for their age. In three months, they went from 0% comprehension to 30% in a test.

But Mitra wanted to see if he could go further. He brought in a 22-year-old woman with no knowledge of the subject to tutor the children, using the method of the grandmother. Instead of traditional instructing, she simply gave encouragement. The childrens test comprehension scores jumped. This is where the granny cloud concept was developed. The granny cloud, was another experiment in which a community of retired teachers were asked to Skype into learning centres and encourage children with questions and assignments.

To Mitra, these "Hole in the Wall" experiments demonstrated that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. As such, he proposes for a virtual, childdriven learning environment where children can explore and learn on their own and teach one another, using resources from the worldwide cloud (TED, 2013). Dr. Mitras wish is that children around the globe get a chance to participate in self-organized learning, that is, to spend time in learning environments where they are given the space to explore on their own and make discoveries. He intends to accomplish this by establishing seven schools in the cloud, five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools will be single-room buildings. There will be no

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups. Instead there will be six computers and volunteer grannies to look after a class of 24 students. The grannies will ask the questions and

offer the encouragement. In this environment, children can tap into their innate sense of wonder, by discovering information online. Mitra calls this type of environment a SOLE a selforganized learning environment. It is based on a curriculum of questions that spark curiosity, varying forms of peer assessment and certification without examination (Copeland, 2013).

These "controlled experiments" will help test the effectiveness of different educational methods, focused on testing Mitra's philosophy of self-organized teaching (Robertson, 2013). For now Mitra envisions that these cloud schools will function as a supplement to the daily education and will operate on the weekends and before and after school (Davis, 2013).

The following is a cartoon illustration of this emerging trend proposed by Dr. Sugata Mitra.

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE

Source: Torgovnick, K. (2013). Sugata Mitras talk, in cartoon form. Retrieved from http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/27/sugata-mitas-talk-in-cartoon-form/

In order to inform and help build the School in the Cloud, Mitra has released a toolkit for parents, educators and teachers who want to create SOLEs. The online resource will help them support children (8-12 years old) as they get the answers to big questions, with the help of their peers. Parents, educators and teachers are challenged to test the SOLE method with students in their school, home or after-school programme and to share what they have learnt with TED in the form of a 500-1000 word blog post. They are required to answer the following questions: What was your experience like in setting up SOLE? Tell us about your SOLE adventure and the students who participated. What were the challenges, how did you overcome them and what did you learn? How do you believe SOLE can be used at your school in the future? (TED, 2013). This feedback will help shape the future of learning. The feedback will be used to create a blueprint, free for others to copy, and a web-based network of educational resources. Attached is the SOLE: How to Bring SelfOrganized Learning Environments to Your Community toolkit.

The School in the Cloud can be considered a constructivist approach to learning. Constructivism suggests that learners create knowledge as they attempt to understand their experiences (Driscoll, 2000). In other words, we learn not only from acquiring knowledge but by interpreting and creating our own knowledge/meaning. Constructivists focus on the learners ability to interpret, think critically and construct knowledge. One principle of the Constructivist theory that can be applied to instructional design is presenting information in different ways and contexts so as to promote the manipulation of information among different

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE

types of learner. Another constructivist principle that can be applied is creating a learning environment which encourages problem solving and transferring of new skills (Ertmer & Newby, 1993). It is proposed that in the cloud schools, teachers will stir up curiosity by asking questions on a topic and students are encouraged to discover their own truths. As such, instructional designers would not be required to develop detailed instructional materials but instead a curriculum of topic areas and questions which can lead to construction of knowledge. Also the School in the Cloud entails elements of problem-based learning which is a studentcentred, collaborative method that uses problems as tools to develop skills and facilitate learning. Problem-based activities should follow the following steps: Students are placed into small groups with no more than four persons Lessons begin with a real life problem to solve Students are asked to design strategies and find solutions to the problem The teacher guides students inquiry through questioning and other forms of scaffolding (Eggan & Kauchak, 2013). It is proposed that these steps should be taken in the cloud schools with the aid of technological tools and the granny cloud who will be encouraging learners to explore further. Mitras use of cloud computing which has emerged close to two (2) years ago, has made the School in the Cloud concept relevant to the fields of instructional design, instructional technology and distance education. Using cloud in the learning environment means that essentially there is no need for teachers at all and a new kind of teacher will be required to meet the demand of a technologically informed student. That new kind of teacher must be capable of managing learning, not delivering learning. The teacher must work with students to guide their

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE path to critical thinking via the cloud. This means that learning can be facilitated at a distance with the use of technological tools.

Cloud technology has multiple uses in the education system. For a particularly large school, or for an entire district or region under the same management, a high capability cloud service provider can provide storage and organization for all involved. This allows for the easy distribution of teaching materials, syllabi and administrative memos. Control over who receives which digital distributions, can be done by the administration of the learning institution (Saltinski, n.d).

Cloud storage also has some uses on a smaller level within school systems, as teachers can make use of private clouds to conveniently and securely store student work and data. With this information stored in a secure cloud, students and teachers can be confident about privacy and security. Digital textbooks, fiction, and nonfiction books, journals, tutorial media like PowerPoint lectures and social tools for analysis and model building, can be made available from the cloud. Most importantly, the cloud has endless opportunities for people of all ages to personalize their learning individually and collaboratively (Saltinski, n.d). In other words, although the School in the Cloud focuses on children aged 8-12 years, it can be extended to secondary and tertiary levels where learners engage in discovery on their own, find answers to big questions and teach each other. Reflections Researching emerging trends/issues in the fields of instructional design, technology and/or distance education, was no easy task. It required lots of reading on what trend/issue exists

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE to determine is this a trend/issue, is this an emerging trend/issue, is there readily accessible information on this trend/issue and so on. I started my readings some time before the assignment was due and settled with two

issues: School in the Cloud and Open edX. I waited over a week or so to get approval on the two issues but when I got it, I was excited. This meant that I did not have to go searching for more trends/issues. Narrowing my research down to two issues helped me to focus my readings. The next challenge was which one I should choose to write on. This meant that I had to read up on the two issues in detail and then choose. The decision was taken to write on the School in the Cloud due to the components of this paper. I felt that since the School in the Cloud emerged out of 13 years of ground work done by Dr Sugata Mitra, it will be more evidenced-based, which should translate to having more things to write about. However, compiling the multiple accounts on the School in the Cloud was not as straight forward as I anticipated. It required a lot of typing and re-typing in order to produce an organised, easy to read paper. Also as I embarked on typing the paper, it prompted more questions which meant that I had to stop preparing the paper and continue researching. As such, this paper evolved over time as research continued. As a result of completing this paper I learnt about some of the issues/trends that exist in the fields of instructional design, technology and/or distance education. My eyes were opened to the various technological tools and developments in the above-mentioned fields that I was not aware of. Doing this paper also reiterated that as an instructor, I am not limited to only chalk and talk methods of delivery. There are existing and upcoming methods which are more technologically advanced, more current and have proven to be successful.

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE

In conclusion, the School in the Cloud is an emerging trend which has its origins in years of experiments conducted by the initiator, Dr. Sugata Mitra. He proposes that children can explore and discover knowledge and teach each other, if they are exposed to a self-organised learning environment. According to Mitra, this environment can be developed with the use of a curriculum of questions, cloud-based technology and grannies who can encourage students to explore further. This means that there is no need for the traditional modes of teaching, including a teacher who has for decades been viewed as the oracle of knowledge. Instead, learning can take place in a more child-driven manner.

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE 10 References

Copeland. M. V. (2013). A School in the Cloud and the future of learning. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/a-school-in-the-cloud-and-the-future-oflearning/

Davis, J. (2013). How a radical new teaching method could unleash a generation of geniuses In The Wired. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/

Driscoll, M. (2000). Psychology of learning for instruction. USA: Allyn & Bacon.

Eggen, P., & Kauchak, D. (2013). Educational psychology: windows on classrooms. (9th ed.). USA: Pearson Education, Inc. Ertmer, P., & Newby, T. (1993). Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 6 (4). 50-72.

Robertson, A. (2013). Online education wins big as TED awards $1 million to pioneer Sugata Mitra: A boon for 'Slumdog Millionaire' inspiration and a statement on the future of learning In The Verge. Retrieved from http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/27/4035596/ted-awards-1-million-prize-to-onlineeducation-pioneer-sugata-mitra

Saltinski, R. (2013). The digital future of education - the Cloud or the Matrix? Retrieved from http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/121370.pdf

EDID 6506 Issues, Trends and Research in ID, IT and DE 11 TED. (2013). TED Prize winners: Sugata Mitra. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/pages/prizewinner_sugata_mitra

Torgovnick, K. (2013). A school in the cloud: Sugata Mitra accepts the TED Prize at TED2013. Retrieved from http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/26/a-school-in-the-cloud-sugata-mitraaccepts-the-ted-prize-at-ted2013/