At TED2013, Sugata Mitra accepted the TED Prize for 2013 with a striking talk. His wish: for children to learn about any variety of subjects through self-organized learning. While this bold project will take form with a "School in the Cloud" in India, Mitra encourages members of our community to help with a global paradigm change by creating...

See all articles in the series >>

Scratch the surface of online education, and you’re destined to run into the names of two men. The first, Salman Khan, never intended to be an education icon. Instead, he simply watched with increased interest as videos he had uploaded to YouTube to help his cousin learn math were seized upon by a world apparently eager to learn via his thou...

From dancing math to teaching in languages other than English – this week’s X marks the spot is a selection of TEDx Talks about rethinking education. Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community, and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, find...

In South Korea and Finland, it's not about finding the "right" school. Fifty years ago, both South Korea and Finland had terrible education systems. Finland was at risk of becoming the economic stepchild of Europe. South Korea was ravaged by civil war. Yet over the past half century, both South Korea and Finland have turned their schools arou...

What’s the future of education? It’s a popular question right now, with answers ranging from online learning to charter schools. But Liz Coleman is focused on a more fundamental issue: what will schools teach? And what does that mean for the future of our society? In her eye-opening talk at TED2009, Coleman shared her hopes and fears for the ...

Schools out of reach Daphne Koller is a third-generation PhD, and in her own words, she is certainly one of the lucky people. Most people, of course, are not. In some parts of the world, quality education is simply not available. In South Africa, for example, the higher education system was designed during Apartheid, and there are far ...

Shai Reshef believes higher education is a right, not a privilege. In January 2009, he founded University of the People, a nonprofit, tuition-free, online university dedicated to opening up higher education to anyone in the world with a high school diploma and a willingness to learn -- “regardless of who they are, where they live or what soc...

Geoffrey Canada gives a very interesting analogy in today's TED Talk: He compares the current education system in the United States to the era when banks were only open between the hours of 10am and 3pm. “Now, who can bank between 10 and 3?” asks Canada to a big laugh. “It went on for decades. You know why? Because they didn’t care. It wasn’t...

From age 6 through age 11, Shabana Basij-Rasikh risked her life to go to school. The Taliban had banned girls in Afghanistan from studying at universities and other educational institutions and, thus, Basij-Rasikh dressed as a boy, posing as an escort for her older sister. Together, the two would place their books in grocery bags and sneak off t...

Sugata Mitra’s bold efforts towards advancing learning earned him the first-ever $1 million dollar TED Prize. At TED2013, Sugata asked the global TED community to make his dream come true by helping him build a “School in the Cloud," where kids can tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Since Sugata is passionate about reinven...

On Tuesday night, PBS and TED joined forces to air TED Talks Education, a one-hour televised special, featuring passionate teachers, students and researchers from the field who shared their ideas about transforming the US education system. We were so inspired by these spirited speakers that we asked them to curate playlists of their favorite...

Scratch the surface of online education, and you’re destined to run into the names of two men. The first, Salman Khan, never intended to be an education icon. Instead, he simply watched with increased interest as videos he had uploaded to YouTube to help his cousin learn math were seized upon by a world apparently eager to learn via his thou...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson Ainissa Ramirez comes on stage armed with a blowtorch. Well, that sure got everyone's attention. She promptly uses said blowtorch to straighten a piece of bent piece of wire. Her point: atoms often rearrange usefully to create entirely different types of structures. The Yale associate professor goes on to exp...

TED-Ed Clubs are about to get a lot of visibility in Italian high schools. On Thursday, March 3, in Rome, the Italian Minister of Education, University and Research, Stefania Giannini, and the European Director of TED, Bruno Giussani, signed a 3-year memorandum of understanding on cooperation regarding the spread of the TED-Ed Clubs curricul...

Anant Agarwal runs EdX.org, the Harvard-MIT open-education site, and he's here to talk MOOCs, those "massively open online courses" that have generated both excitement and skepticism throughout the chattering world of the digital classes. Agarwal shows a picture of a lecture hall in MIT from 50 years ago. Then one of the scene from today....

TED is coming to a TV screen near you. On Tuesday, May 7, our first-ever television special will air on PBS at 10pm. Called TED Talks Education, the special is a deep dive on ideas to make our education system stronger – with talks from teachers, learning experts, education researchers and more. The speaker roster includes: host John Legend,...

In this contested territory, women must endure a lengthy, frustrating process when they pursue a university education abroad. Here are four of their stories. “For me, two basic human rights are the right to education and the freedom of movement,” says Kuwaiti-raised Palestinian photojournalist Laura Boushnak (TED Talk: For these women, reading ...

Watch Andreas Schleicher's TED Talk >> "Learning is not a place, it's an activity," says Andreas Schleicher. He heads up the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, also known as PISA, and he's here to make the case that international comparisons of education systems can help to raise the global bar for students and l...

The Internet has delivered an explosion of learning opportunities for today’s students, creating an abundance of information, knowledge, and teachers as well as a starkly different landscape from the one in which our ideas about school were born. Traditional educators, classrooms, and brick-and-mortar schools are no longer necessary to access ...

Education is generally thought of as a domestic policy issue. But what can we learn by looking at education on the global scale? In today’s talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012, Andreas Schleicher introduces us to a test that measures school systems and student achievement in countries across the globe—PISA (the Programme for International Stude...

Where does education go from here? On Tuesday, Sugata Mitra accepted the 2013 TED Prize and offered a bold wish for the world: that we encourage children to explore questions about our world in self-organized learning environments. He proposed the founding of a School in the Cloud based in India, and encouraged TED community members, wherever...

George Siemens taught the first "massive open online course" back in 2008. He shares his take on why the class form is still valid -- and what might happen next in higher ed. In the past few years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a lens used by educators, entrepreneurs, education reformers and venture capitalists to view the h...

“Let us wage a glorious struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism. Let us pick up our books and our pens, and let us shield ourselves with unity and togetherness.” These were the words spoken by 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai, above, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012 for advocating for girls’...

How is it that science classes have become about memorization and filling in the right circle on a Scantron sheet, rather than about doing hands-on experiments and activities that reveal the wonder of the world around us? It’s a problem that Tyler DeWitt tackled in yesterday’s talk, “Hey science teachers -- make it fun.” And it’s a warning bell ...

Enjoy a sampling of the stories from around the internet that captured our interest this week: This look at the dramatic rise of MOOCs and other online college offerings points out a basic conundrum: can these courses make money? [The New York Times] Several TED speakers have given talks about online education this year: Peter Norvig des...

Adam Braun went to school in the US and now runs a nonprofit that builds schools in Ghana, Laos, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In contrast, Sugata Mitra—the winner of the 2013 TED Prize—went to school in India and now is a professor in the UK, where his research on self-directed learning routinely brings him into elementary schools. Both of these...

“The One World Schoolhouse fleshes out the story and vision that began with my talk at TED,” Salman Khan tells the TED Blog. His new book, out this week, lays out a bold strategy for bringing "a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere." In the book, Khan talks about such points as: Why technology will make classrooms more human and...

Timothy Bartik says that investing in early childhood education is not just good for the children involved -- but for communities as a whole. In today’s talk, he offers a detailed look at how preschool education boosts local economies in colossal ways. “Early childhood education can bring more and better jobs to a state and can thereby promot...

“Innovation in education involves constant collaboration with colleagues — a total last-minute redo of a teacher’s lesson plan because there was something else out there that he or she just had to try, a change in the direction of a class because the students are driving the instruction.” “Innovation in education happens when educators ask, ‘...