The SOLE experience (Self Organized Learning Environment) is a concept and a project of Indian born academic, Sugata Mitra, who proposes the need for a profound change in education, where children work autonomously with the guidance and motivation of the teacher, as well as the support of technological resources such as the Internet and computers.

Sugata Mitra is a doctor of physics with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and educational technology. Retiring in 2019 as Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University, UK, he has since devoted his time to furthering his vision of what the education of boys and girls should be. He received the Dewang Mehta Award from the Government of India for Innovation in Information Technology in the year 2003. Among many other awards, he was awarded the TED Prize for 1 million dollars in 2013.

For the formulation of our course on Rethinking Education, we asked Professor Mitra to share his experience with SOLES by following a step by step- by-step design thinking process that Pertanto applies to for designing solutions for the most complex problems of today. In his particular case oriented towards the role that students themselves occupy in their learning and how technology is part of this dynamic. A great source of inspiration for Mitra are “networks”, especially those that are self-organized and self-managed, those that arise spontaneously out of necessity; this happens all the time in nature, and for Mitra the Internet is not only a great network that connects, but it is also one that has come to signify everything, especially the concept of knowledge.

“I say that knowledge is obsolete because before it was understood as something that is inside children’s heads, but now everything is on the phone or the computer, therefore it becomes more important that children have the ability to choose –between so much information they receive– what do you want to learn and what not. This may sound very foreign to us, but not to the generations to come,”

-Mitra said.-

If you are interested in learning more about Sugata Mitra’s experience in the SOLE centers, his reason for being, evolution and future, we invite you to watch the Live Conversation REthinking SOLES in which we talk with Professor Mitra and Jeff McClellan (Founding Director of StartSOLE).