Dubai: “Allow the use of internet during exams,” said Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, during a session titled ‘How will cloud-based schools change our education?’
“Education systems are in denial. They want to ignore the internet. They take away smart devices from students and then ask them to calculate the square root of a number. It’s torture,” said Mitra.
After conducting a number of experiments on children in the UK and India, Mitra found that students learn best by themselves in a self-organised learning environment.
Mitra came to this conclusion after he conducted an experiment where he made the internet accessible to children in rural India who never used the internet and can’t speak English. He said they learnt how to use it in hours, by one month they had started downloading games and by three months they had started typing their homework into search engines.
“Children can learn almost anything by themselves in a self-organised learning environment when using the internet. They learn to find answers to questions and their reading comprehension, searching skills and self-confidence improve quickly,” said Mitra, who emphasised that reading, writing and arithmetic are of lower priority, while comprehensiveness, communication and computation are the new basics.
Mitra also said the current assessments which look for identical responses from learners must be changed, as open-ended questions cannot be asked in such assessment systems.
“If I can make one administrative decision in schools I will allow the use of the internet in exams. Fair evaluation of such a new assessment system is not possible by human examiners, therefore more research on automated and continuous evaluation of open-ended questions and tasks is needed,” he said.
Mitra said providing direct factual information manually is irrelevant, adding that the role of memory in education does not need emphasis as devices are playing that role now.
“All irrelevant knowledge and skills need to be removed in current curriculums. The internet must be a subject as important as science or mathematics,” he said.
Mitra also said the duration of schooling and the length of a school day needs to be reviewed. He said schools and teachers should exist in physical and virtual environments, adding that not all teachers need to be human.