Minimally invasive education (MIE) is a form of learning in which children operate in unsupervised environments. The methodology arose from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999, often called The Hole in the Wall,[1][2] which has since gone on to become a significant project with the formation of Hole in the Wall Education Limited (HiWEL), a cooperative effort between NIIT and the International Finance Corporation, employed in some 300 'learning stations', covering some 300,000 children in India and several African countries.
The programme has been feted with the digital opportunity award by WITSA,[2] and been extensively covered in the media.
History
Background
Professor Mitra, Chief Scientist at NIIT, is credited with proposing and initiating the Hole-in-the-Wall programme. As early as 1982, he had been toying with the idea of unsupervised learning and computers. Finally, in 1999, he decided to test his ideas in the field.
The experiment
On 26 January 1999, Mitra's team carved a "hole in the wall" that separated the NIIT premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. Through this hole, a freely accessible computer was put up for use. This computer proved to be popular among the slum children. With no prior experience, the children learned to use the computer on their own. This prompted Mitra to propose the following hypothesis:[3] The acquisition of basic computing skills by any set of children can be achieved through incidental learning provided the learners are given access to a suitable computing facility, with entertaining and motivating content and some minimal (human) guidance.
In the following comment on the TED website Mitra explains how they saw to it that the computer in this experiment was accessible to children only:
"... We placed the computers 3 feet off the ground and put a shade on top, so if you are tall, you hit your head on it. Then we put a protective plastic cowl over the keyboard which had an opening such that small hands would go in. Then we put a seating rod in front that was close to the wall so that, if you are of adult height, your legs would splay when you sit. Then we painted the whole thing in bright colours and put a sign saying 'for children under 15'. Those design factors prevented adult access to a very large extent."[4]
Results
Mitra has summarised the results of his experiment as follows. Given free and public access to computers and the Internet, a group of children can
Become computer literate on their own, that is, they can learn to use computers and the Internet for most of the tasks done by lay users.
Teach themselves enough English to use email, chat and search engines.
Learn to search the Internet for answers to questions in a few months time.
Improve their mathematics and science scores in school.
Answer examination questions several years ahead of time.
Change their social interaction skills and value systems.
Form independent opinions and detect indoctrination.[5]
Current status and expansion outside India
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The first adopter of the idea was the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi. In 2000, the Government of Delhi set up 30 Learning Stations in a resettlement colony. This project is ongoing and said to be achieving significant results.
Encouraged by the initial success of the Kalkaji experiment, freely accessible computers were set up in Shivpuri (a town in Madhya Pradesh) and in Madantusi (a village in Uttar Pradesh). These experiments came to be known as Hole-in-the-Wall experiments. The findings from Shivpuri and Madantusi confirmed the results of Kalkaji experiments. It appeared that the children in these two places picked up computer skills on their own. Dr. Mitra defined this as a new way of learning "Minimally Invasive Education".
At this point in time, International Finance Corporation joined hands with NIIT to set up Hole-in-the-Wall Education Ltd (HiWEL). The idea was to broaden the scope of the experiments and conduct research to prove and streamline Hole-in-the-Wall. The results,[6] show that children learn to operate as well as play with the computer with minimum intervention. They picked up skills and tasks by constructing their own learning environment.
Today, more than 300,000 children have benefited from 300 Hole-in-the-Wall stations over last 8 years. In India Suhotra Banerjee (Head-Government Relations) has increased the reach of HiWEL learning stations in Nagaland, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh... and is slowly expanding their numbers.[7]
Besides India, HiWEL also has projects abroad. The first such project was established in Cambodia in 2004. The project currently operates in Botswana, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Swaziland, Uganda, and Zambia, besides Cambodia.[7] The idea, also called Open learning, is even being applied in Britain, albeit inside the classroom.[8]
HiWEL
Hole-in-the-Wall Education Ltd. (HiWEL) is a joint venture between NIIT and the International Finance Corporation. Established in 2001, HiWEL was set up to research and propagate the idea of Hole-in-the-Wall, a path-breaking learning methodology created by Mitra, Chief Scientist of NIIT.[2]
Awards and recognition
Digital Opportunity Award by the World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA) in 2008. Reason: "groundbreaking work in developing computer literacy and improving the quality of education at a grass root level."[7]
The project received international publicity, when it was found that it was the inspiration behind the book Q & A, itself the inspiration for the Academy Award winning film Slumdog Millionaire.[7]
Minimally Invasive Education in school adduces there are many reasons why children may have difficulty learning, especially when the learning is imposed and the subject is something the student is not interested in, a frequent occurrence in modern schools. Schools also label children as "learning disabled" and place them in special education even if the child does not have a learning disability, because the schools have failed to teach the children basic skills.[13]
Minimally Invasive Education in school asserts there are many ways to study and learn. It argues that learning is a process you do, not a process that is done to you.[14] The experience of schools holding this approach shows that there are many ways to learn without the intervention of teaching, to say, without the intervention of a teacher being imperative. In the case of reading for instance in these schools some children learn from being read to, memorizing the stories and then ultimately reading them. Others learn from cereal boxes, others from games instructions, others from street signs. Some teach themselves letter sounds, others syllables, others whole words. They adduce that in their schools no one child has ever been forced, pushed, urged, cajoled, or bribed into learning how to read or write, and they have had no dyslexia. None of their graduates are real or functional illiterates, and no one who meets their older students could ever guess the age at which they first learned to read or write.[15]
In a similar form students learn all the subjects, techniques and skills in these schools. Every person, children and youth included, has a different learning style and pace and each person, is unique, not only capable of learning but also capable of succeeding. These schools assert that applying the medical model of problem-solving to individual children who are pupils in the school system, and labeling these children as disabled—referring to a whole generation of non-standard children that have been labeled as dysfunctional, even though they suffer from nothing more than the disease of responding differently in the classroom than the average manageable student—systematically prevents the students' success and the improvement of the current educational system, thus requiring the prevention of academic failure through intervention. This, they clarify, does not refer to people who have a specific disability that affects their drives; nor is anything they say and write about education meant to apply to people who have specific mental impairments, which may need to be dealt with in special, clinical ways.
Describing current instructional methods as homogenization and lockstep standardization, alternative approaches are proposed, such as the Sudbury model schools, an alternative approach in which children, by enjoying personal freedom thus encouraged to exercise personal responsibility for their actions, learn at their own pace rather than following a chronologically-based curriculum.[16][17][18][19] These schools are organized to allow freedom from adult interference in the daily lives of students. As long as children do no harm to others, they can do whatever they want with their time in school. The adults in other schools plan a curriculum of study, teach the students the material and then test and grade their learning. The adults at Sudbury schools are "the guardians of the children's freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn what they wish," creating and maintaining a nurturing environment, in which children feel that they are cared for, and that does not rob children of their time to explore and discover their inner selves. They also are there to answer questions and to impart specific skills or knowledge when asked to by students.[20][21] As Sudbury schools, proponents of unschooling have also claimed that children raised in this method do not suffer from learning disabilities, thus not requiring the prevention of academic failure through intervention.
"If learning is an emergent phenomenon, then the teacher needs to provide stimulus — lots of it – in the form of “big” questions. These must include questions to which the teacher, or perhaps anyone, does not have the answer. These should be the sorts of questions that will occupy children’s minds perpetually. The teacher needs to help each child cultivate a vision of the future. Thus, a new primary curriculum needs to teach only three skills: 1. Reading comprehension: This is perhaps the most crucial skill a child needs to acquire while growing up. 2. Information search and analysis: First articulated at the National Institute of Technology in India by professor J.R. Isaac in the early 1990s — decades ahead of its time — this skill set is vital for children searching for answers in an infinite cyberspace. 3. A rational system of belief: If children know how to search, and if they know how to read, then they must learn how to believe. Each one of us has a belief system. How soon can a child acquire one? A rational belief system will be our children’s protection against doctrine. Children who have these skills scarcely need schools as we define them today. They need a learning environment and a source of rich, big questions. Computers can give out answers, but they cannot, as of yet, make questions. Hence, the teacher’s role becomes bigger and stranger than ever before: She must ask her “learners” about things she does not know herself. Then she can stand back and watch as learning emerges."[22]
Learning theory describes how students receive, process, and retain knowledge during learning. Cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences, as well as prior experience, all play a part in how understanding, or a worldview, is acquired or changed and knowledge and skills retained.
A teaching method is a set of principles and methods used by teachers to enable student learning. These strategies are determined partly by the subject matter to be taught, partly by the relative expertise of the learners, and partly by constraints caused by the learning environment. For a particular teaching method to be appropriate and efficient it has to take into account the learner, the nature of the subject matter, and the type of learning it is supposed to bring about.
Unschooling is a belief of self-driven informal learning characterized by a lesson-free and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, under the belief that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood, and therefore useful it is to the child.
In the field of political science, civics is the study of the civil and political rights and obligations of citizens in a society. The term civics derives from the Latin word civicus, meaning "relating to a citizen". In U.S. politics, in the context of urban planning, the term civics comprehends the city politics that affect the political decisions of the citizenry of a city.
A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching.
Educational assessment or educational evaluation is the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data on the knowledge, skill, attitudes, aptitude and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning. Assessment data can be obtained by examining student work directly to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or it is based on data from which one can make inferences about learning. Assessment is often used interchangeably with test but is not limited to tests. Assessment can focus on the individual learner, the learning community, a course, an academic program, the institution, or the educational system as a whole. The word "assessment" came into use in an educational context after the Second World War.
A Sudbury school is a type of school, usually for the K-12 age range, where students have complete responsibility for their own education, and the school is run by a direct democracy in which students and staff are equal citizens. Students use their time however they wish, and learn as a by-product of ordinary experience rather than through coursework. There is no predetermined educational syllabus, prescriptive curriculum or standardized instruction. This is a form of democratic education. Daniel Greenberg, one of the founders of the original Sudbury Model school, writes that the two things that distinguish a Sudbury Model school are that everyone is treated equally and that there is no authority other than that granted by the consent of the governed.
Educational technology is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning. When referred to with its abbreviation, "EdTech", it often refers to the industry of companies that create educational technology. In EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age, Tanner Mirrlees and Shahid Alvi (2019) argue "EdTech is no exception to industry ownership and market rules" and "define the EdTech industries as all the privately owned companies currently involved in the financing, production and distribution of commercial hardware, software, cultural goods, services and platforms for the educational market with the goal of turning a profit. Many of these companies are US-based and rapidly expanding into educational markets across North America, and increasingly growing all over the world."
Democratic education is a type of formal education that is organized democratically, so that students can manage their own learning and participate in the governance of their educational environment. Democratic education is often specifically emancipatory, with the students' voices being equal to the teachers'.
Rajendra Singh Pawar is an Indian entrepreneur, chairman and co-founder of NIIT Limited, established in 1981. He also founded NIIT University, a not-for-profit university in Neemrana, Rajasthan, in 2009.
Critical consciousness, conscientization, or conscientização in Portuguese, is a popular education and social concept developed by Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist Paulo Freire, grounded in neo-Marxist critical theory. Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding.
Freedom to Learn (FTL) is a statewide education program in Michigan helping schools create high performing, student-centered learning environments by providing each student and teacher with direct, consistent access to 21st century learning tools.
Pratham is one of the largest non-governmental organisations in India. It was co-founded by Madhav Chavan and Farida Lambay. It works towards the provision of quality education to the underprivileged children in India. Established in Mumbai in 1995 to provide pre-school education to children in slums, Pratham today has interventions spread across 23 states and union territories of India and has supporting chapters in the United States, UK, Germany, Sweden, and Australia.
Inquiry-based learning is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios. It contrasts with traditional education, which generally relies on the teacher presenting facts and their knowledge about the subject. Inquiry-based learning is often assisted by a facilitator rather than a lecturer. Inquirers will identify and research issues and questions to develop knowledge or solutions. Inquiry-based learning includes problem-based learning, and is generally used in small-scale investigations and projects, as well as research. The inquiry-based instruction is principally very closely related to the development and practice of thinking and problem-solving skills.
An educational video game is a video game that provides learning or training value to the player. Edutainment describes an intentional merger of video games and educational software into a single product. In the narrower sense used here, the term describes educational software which is primarily about entertainment, but tends to educate as well and sells itself partly under the educational umbrella. Normally software of this kind is not structured towards school curricula and does not involve educational advisors.
Sugata Mitra is an Indian computer scientist and educational theorist. He is best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Professor Emeritus at NIIT University, Rajasthan, India. A Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in England, after 13 years there including a year in 2012 as visiting professor at MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He won the TED Prize 2013.
NIIT Limited (National Institute of Information Technology) is an Indian multinational skills and talent development corporation headquartered in Gurgaon, India. The company was set up in 1981 to help the nascent IT industry overcome its human resource challenges. NIIT offers training and development to individuals, enterprises and institutions.
Student-directed teaching is a teaching technology that aims to give the student greater control, ownership, and accountability over his or her own education. Developed to counter institutionalized, mass, schooling, student-directed teaching allows students to make their own choices while they learn in order to make education much more meaningful, relevant, and effective.
Arvind Gupta is an Indian science educator, toy inventor, author, translator and scientist. He received the civilian award Padma Shree from the Indian government on the eve of Republic Day, 2018.
A Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) is a program designed to support self-directed education. Sugata Mitra, an education scientist, first popularized the term in 1999, referencing an approach he developed following his Hole in the Wall experiments. Mitra's experiments demonstrated that groups of kids could learn to navigate computers and the internet by themselves, and "research since then has continued to support his startling conclusion that groups of children, with access to the Internet, can learn almost anything by themselves." Starting in 2014, he's worked with and through the School in the Cloud project to support the development of SOLEs around the world, adding "Granny" mentors and Big Questions as key components of such programs.
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