At exactly 4pm, a retired UK teacher, Lesley Keast, comes online on Skype from Madrid, where she is holidaying. The image of her cheerful face on the large screen is grainy, but it is enough to get the 15-odd children attending the session that day excited. “Hello ma’am," they say in unison as soon as the Internet connection feebly carries Keast’s voice saying, “Hello Korakati."

Korakati village is about 110km from Kolkata, located deep inside the deltaic Sunderbans region criss-crossed by numerous rivers and canals, rising and ebbing to the tidal flow of the Bay of Bengal nearby. It can be reached in about 5 hours from Kolkata—the route involves car and boat rides, walking, and travel on open vans. With a population of about 7,000, the agrarian economy of this village is dependent largely on the single annual crop of paddy; the monthly household income is ₹ 3,000-4,000, according to locals. Electricity arrived last year in the village, which is home mostly to below poverty line (BPL) families and first-generation literates.

Korakati’s School in the Cloud, part of Kolkata-born Professor Sugata Mitra’s experiments with non-conventional education for children through a self-organized learning environment (SOLE), is in the “remotest" location. There are seven such schools, two in the UK and the rest in India—one each in Maharashtra and Delhi and three, including the one at Sunderbans, in West Bengal. “It was our effort to see whether we can leverage technology for learning in a largely tribal, underprivileged belt; if our model can work in the Sunderbans, it’ll work anywhere," says Ritu Dangwal, project coordinator of the School in the Cloud.

The project partners include, among others, the UK’s Newcastle University, where Mitra is a professor of educational technology, software firm Microsoft and TED—the global ideas-based conference chain which awarded its $1 million (now ₹ 6.67 crore) prize in 2013 to Prof. Mitra to help kick-start his project.

The school, also referred to as a lab, has around 150 students, including 49 regular ones whose activities and development are documented for research by two coordinators. There are seven computer terminals including two with Internet connections, one of these is used mostly during Granny sessions, like the one with Keast which take place four-five times a week. The school runs on solar power.

Here you find the likes of 14-year-olds Mridul Mondal and Sudipta Roy Mondal, communicating with us in halting English, at ease with the computer and Internet, searching keywords, translating difficult text from English to Bengali and, for 1 hour daily over Skype, conversing with retired native English-speaking teachers, known as Grannies.

The genesis of the School in the Cloud project lies in the “Hole in the Wall" experiments Prof. Mitra started in 1999 at a slum near his Kalkaji office in Delhi. “The School in the Cloud is the Hole in the Wall turned inside out, in a manner of speaking," Prof. Mitra says on email. While teaching computer programming in New Delhi, he pondered over the future of the children at this slum. In his award-winning TED speech, he contextualizes, saying many rich parents would consider their children “gifted" for their ability to use the computer. “I suddenly figured, how come all these rich people are having all these extraordinarily gifted children? What did the poor do wrong?"

He got his answer after he installed an Internet-connected computer to a hole made in the boundary wall of his office, its screen facing the slum. The children weren’t exposed to computers and didn’t know English and when the children asked what the machine was, Prof. Mitra mumbled “yeah…I mean…hmmm…I don’t know". A hidden camera kept track. About 8 hours later, the children were found browsing and teaching each other how to browse. They must have been helped by one of the students passing by, a colleague told him.

He repeated the experiment in a remote village about 500km from Delhi, “where the chances of a passing software development engineer were very little," he told the TED audience, amid much mirth. He returned to the village a couple of months later to find the children playing games on the computer. “When they saw me, they said, we need a faster processor and a better mouse." In tones that betrayed their irritation, they told him that the machine knew only English, so they had to “teach themselves" English. “That’s the first time as a teacher that I heard the words ‘teach ourselves’ said so casually," says Prof. Mitra, a physics graduate from Kolkata’s Jadavpur University and an MSc and PhD degree holder in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

The TED website notes that the Hole in the Wall experiments “have shown that in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest". This became the basis of the SOLEs that currently provide the intellectual bulwark for the Cloud Schools. “SOLEs should be used as a powerful pedagogical method by ‘teachers’. Teachers don’t need to ‘drive’ anything. They need to enable learning to happen by itself," Prof. Mitra writes in response to my emailed query on whether SOLE can be a true substitute for a formal teacher-driven education system. “The same thing is, interestingly, happening to cars. You won’t need to drive them, you have to just let them drive themselves. And to give them a destination."

It’s been a little over two years since the School in the Cloud became the preferred daily destination for 49 children in the Sunderbans. Some cycle 10km to be there, others walk. Children of farmers, construction workers and small shop owners—their only exposure to computers, says Mridul, a class VIII student at the local school, “is from seeing one in the teachers’ room". Quite often, the teachers are absent, but youngsters like him spend their time at the School in the Cloud with its glass-fronted exterior, constructed on land donated by a local schoolteacher.

Initially, none of the children could even manoeuvre the cursor. Nirupam Mondal, who lives in a neighbouring village, had a computer at home and taught the children the basics, their e-learning in school was honed through proficiency at games like Farm Frenzy, Jacked and Star Defender.

A day at the school includes sessions where a “big" question is posed—the children have to surf the Internet for answers. On the day of our visit, Aniket Mondal and Milan Mondal, the two coordinators at Korakati, have asked the children, “Why do we forget?" The children soon get into a huddle and start trawling Google, accessing sites like Thescientificamerican.com and Verywell.com. Difficult English words are translated into Bengali through Google Translate and important points are jotted down. “There is no marking system, but we do compliment those who come up with proper answers. We don’t intervene in their search at all," says Aniket.

One of the most interesting aspects of children working in groups in a SOLE, says Prof. Mitra, is that they self-correct. “One lot of nine-year-olds told me that if they find two websites saying different things, they look for a third and fourth and then discuss what might be right. This is like what PhD students might do."

Over two years, the 64-year-old education researcher has found students across such schools showing improvement in reading, comprehension, collaboration and consensus-building, self-confidence, Internet literacy and search skills and the ability to address complex and “big" questions. In the case of the Korakati school, students improved their English-language skills too—the proof lies in their speaking skills.

Soon, it is time for the Granny session—Prof. Mitra’s plot to involve the grandmother’s benign presence in a child’s learning. When he advertised for retired English teachers to conduct 1-hour hand-holding sessions over Skype, about 300 volunteered from all over the world; about 75 of them continue to be active.

Keast is a popular Granny, patient and polite with children from another hemisphere. She wants to “do something" with musical instruments today, Keast says over Skype, also typing in what she is saying so students can understand her easily. The children are unsure, but quickly do a Google Translation of “musical instruments". Soon, they find an image, which they copy-paste back to Keast. “Guiter, guiter," one of them types. Notwithstanding the spelling, Keast smiles, but the images and speech are flickering on both sides—it has been an expensive challenge to install the VSAT connection in far-flung Sunderbans.

“Ma’am, we off our picture," the children type in, knowing well how to save bandwidth by switching off their video feed. “No problem," says Keast, adding, “I’ll use my imagination to see you."

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