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Case studyEducation

TED & Microsoft: School in the Cloud

We co-designed School in the Cloud with Skype Grannies and children around the world.

In 1999 Sugata Mitra put an internet-connected computer into a wall in a New Delhi slum and watched groups of children teach themselves to use it. The Hole in the Wall experiment led to three TED Talks and, in 2013, the first million-dollar TED Prize, awarded for his wish to build a School in the Cloud: a place where children anywhere could learn on their own, together.

  • 2 weeks

    to a coded prototype in children’s hands

  • 250

    students testing it, through educators on five continents

  • 8 months

    from our first playback to its unveiling at TED 2014

The problem

Made by Many had spent the previous three years building Skype in the Classroom, and on the strength of that work we were introduced to Sugata and asked to join TED, Microsoft, Skype and IDEO to make his wish real, working alongside his research teams at Newcastle University and in Pune, India. The wish already existed as a web of volunteer ‘Grannies’ (retired English teachers for the most part), Google forms, spreadsheets and wikis co-ordinated by an administrator in Pune.

The grannies told us in interviews that they loved the work, wanted one simple website instead of seven improvised ones, and feared that whatever replaced the tangle would lose its personal touch. The system could not grow, and it could not produce the data Sugata needed to prove the model.

What we did

We treated the existing tangle as a working prototype and rebuilt it as an integrated platform. A cross-functional team of researchers, service designers, product designers and engineers ran co-design workshops with students in the UK and India, interviewed the grannies and Sugata’s team. Within two weeks we had a coded prototype in children’s hands, and tested it with 250 students through educators on five continents, watching video of the tools being used in real classrooms.

The classrooms ranged from remote villages in West Bengal to schools in north-east England, so the platform was built to run on low-bandwidth browsers, and on Xbox One, with a two-screen classroom experience carrying Sugata’s Big Questions method. In the background, it gathered the quantitative and qualitative evidence the Newcastle and Pune researchers needed.

The result

Chris Anderson unveiled the School in the Cloud onstage at TED 2014 in Vancouver, eight months after our first playback. The platform connected the Granny Cloud and Self Organised Learning Environments around the world, and we ran it to a sustainable footing before handing it back to Sugata’s team. The three years that followed were filmed by Jerry Rothwell and released in 2018 as the feature documentary School in the Cloud.

A group of boys crowd round a computer screen with a webcam taped to its top
Sugata Mitra talks to students at their computers, in front of a projected Big Question, ‘Why are teardrops shaped the way they are?’, and a woman on a video call
A co-design workshop kit on a table: a box of prompt sheets on the constraints SOLEs face and what they might want to access, with marker pens and stacks of orange, yellow and blue cards
Sugata Mitra stands arm in arm with a smiling man in an orange Skype cap and a visitor’s lanyard
The School in the Cloud homepage: ‘The global experiment in self-organised learning’ over a photo of two smiling children, with Big Questions, SOLE and Granny Cloud illustrated below
A School in the Cloud screen: a search for parts of the brain above a blue board where a labelled brain diagram is being dragged in among pictures and notes
Four schoolchildren in white shirts sit together at a table, smiling and talking
A School in the Cloud page for a SOLE lab in Gocharan, West Bengal, with an approval prompt, a map, a facilitator and photos
The title card of the documentary The School in the Cloud: a boy looks up through a paper telescope beneath a cloudy sky full of questions
A child points at a monitor showing the Big Question ‘How did Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment change our lives?’ as others look on
The School in the Cloud website on the giant screens at TED 2014, a speaker on the red circle before a packed auditorium

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