Empowering Students Through Self Learning

Simply put - the education system in Pakistan has failed in producing young adults with skills that are needed in the 21st century: creativity, teamwork and problem solving. We at Khud are going to rectify that. By providing an environment to children where we harness the innate and powerful ability of “self-learning.”

Prescription is out. Freedom to roam is in. Why? As Elon Musk put’s it:

"If you want to teach children how engines work, you wouldn’t want to first teach them all about wrenches and screwdrivers. Rather you would show them the engine, and ask how they would take it apart. Then a very important thing happens, which is that the relevance of the tools becomes apparent.”

The world is changing way too fast. We should be looking to empower children so they can solve their own problems. Otherwise they will never be able to keep up. The adage of “teaching someone to fish” could not be truer for our times.

How are we going to go about it at Khud? We are going to be agile - experiment, fail/learn and adapt.

Our starting point – in our first school we provided students with laptops connected to internet and gave them a space to see what they would do. Their response? We need to learn how to type and type fast. They googled around and found a way to test their typing speed. Off to the races!

In addition to our principle of being agile, we want Khud to be data driven. That way we can be objective around determining what works and what does not. We hit gold with “Typing speed” – great data point to track progress. Speed increased 400% in a matter of days:

Shared this data with Dr James Stanfield (who is working with Sugata Mirta around the School in the Cloud  initiative) and Sarah Schoengold (who is the TED Prize Project Coordinator) and they too thought it was a great way to measure progress. With all the various efforts related self-organized learning that they know of, they had not seen anyone measuring this. So great news – we are blazing a trail.

We are not going to stop here. Our goal is to find more data points to measure progress and literacy. As easy as this may sound, it is going to be an uphill climb. We are not going to shy away. So stay tuned for more around this.

[Image Credit: Sukhdev Sing]