Topic: Educational Technology

Ishan Gupta

Ishan Gupta is the Managing Director, Udacity, India. Udacity is democratizing education to make it affordable and accessible for people around the world. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with operations in China, Germany, India, and the UK, Udacity provides online education to millions of students in collaboration with top employers including Google, Facebook, AT&T, IBM Watson, Amazon Alexa, Mercedes, Didi Chuxing, FlipKart and more. Ishan’s role in Udacity as the Managing Director for India is to build a strong team, launch more India-focused courses and take the Indian business to new heights.

Ishan was until end of 2016, the Vice President (Business) at Paytm (India's largest mobile commerce company, valued at $6Bn). Before that, he was running EduKart in India, which he had founded in 2011. The company went on to become the largest education marketplace of India.

Ishan has earlier worked at Facebook as a growth manager for India and established a corporate development division for a telco services company.

With a philosophy, ‘good is the enemy of great’; Ishan’s passion about democratisation of education has allowed him to lead and contribute to various initiatives which have resulted in education being an equaliser.

He did his engineering from University of Delhi and MBA from Stanford University, California, USA. Besides that, Ishan has published a book on entrepreneurship titled “Make the Move- Demystifying Entrepreneurship” and has been invited to speak on topics of leadership, entrepreneurship and ed-tech at various prestigious venues in India and outside including TEDx, Stanford Graduate Business School, IITs (Delhi, Mumbai), IIM - Bangalore, ISB, India Conference at Harvard and many more.

Ishan frequently writes on topics pertaining to education, technology, entrepreneurship and business management for leading Indian publications like The Times of India, India Today, YourStory, Indian Express and more. Ishan has also been featured on prestigious global and Indian platforms like TechCrunch and The Economic Times among others.

For his contribution to education technology, Ishan has been featured twice on CNBC Young Turks in 2006 and 2018. Young Turks is one of CNBC - TV 18’s longest running shows for young entrepreneurs in India. He has also served as the chairperson of Education Technology Committee of Internet & Mobile Association of India.  

 

Sugata Mitra

Prof. Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK.

He is the instigator of the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, where in the year 1999 a computer was embedded within a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi and children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught computers very easily without any formal training. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated at many places.

His interests include Children’s Education, Remote Presence, Self-organising systems, Cognitive Systems, Physics and Consciousness.

The Hole in the Wall experiment has left a mark on popular culture. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Mitra's experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel that went on to become the Oscar winning movie of 2009 - Slumdog Millionaire.

He is a Ph.D. in Physics credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and educational technology. He was conferred the prestigious Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology in the year 2005. Starting with molecular orbital computation in the 1970s, Mitra discovered that the structure of organic molecules determine their function more than the constituent atoms. After a Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from the IIT, Delhi, he went on to research energy storage systems, first at the Centre for Energy Studies in the IIT and then at the Technische Universität, Vienna, Austria. This resulted in a new design for Zinc-Chlorine batteries.
His interest in computer networking led him towards the emerging systems in printing in the 1980s. He set up India’s first local area network based newspaper publishing system in 1984 and went on to predict the desktop publishing industry. This in turn led to the invention of LAN based database publishing and he created the “Yellow Pages” industry in India and Bangladesh.

His interest in the human mind once again led him into the areas of learning and memory and he was amongst the first in the world to show that simulated neural networks can help decipher the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease.

He was amongst the first people in the world to invent Voluntary Perception Recording (a continuously variable voting machine) and a hyperlinked computing environment, several years ahead of the Internet.
Professor Mitra’s work at NIIT created the first curricula and pedagogy for that organisation, followed by years of research on learning styles, learning devices, several of them now patented, multimedia and new methods of learning. Culminating and, perhaps, towering over his previous work, are his “hole in the wall” experiments with children’s learning. Since 1999, he has convincingly demonstrated that groups of children, irrespective of whom or where they are, can learn to use computers and the Internet on their own using public computers in open spaces such as roads and playgrounds. His publication was judged the best open access publication in the world for 2005.

Since the 1970s, Professor Mitra’s publications and work has resulted in training and development of perhaps a million young Indians, amongst them some of the poorest children in the world. The resultant changes in the lives of people and the economy of the country can only be guessed at.

Educational researcher Sugata Mitra was the winner of the 2013 TED Prize