Prof. Sugata Mitra is an Emeritus Professor and a founding professor of NU. He retired in 2019 after 13 years as a Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in the UK, including a year as a Visiting Professor at MIT Media lab in the USA. His TED talk, 'Build a School in the Cloud' after receiving the first one million dollar TED prize in 2013 has been watched over 5 million times.
The title of his talk was ‘The future of work’ in which he traced the development of machines starting from tools and evolving into almost sentient technology. In the process, much of the work that human beings had to do began to be done by machines. Prof. Mitra extrapolates the obsolescence of ‘work’ as we understand it. As much of ‘work’ becomes obsolete, so does the related education and training that was used to prepare people for working.
As the future changes the world rapidly, education needs to change from ‘just in case’ to ‘just in time’ and assessment systems need to change to reflect this new reality. over 5 million times.
