May 8 OWL Global Wisdom Circle:
Kunal Chawla

A monthly video-circle for sharing wisdom, experience and support among global citizens everywhere.

 

Creating New Pathways

Can you recall a time when you were forced to admit that what you were doing with your life was not working, and the only way way forward was to change your reality map and find a new way?

Kunal Chawla is a teacher, course designer, social entrepreneur and science learning visionary. He's led an education and employment development project in rural India, worked as a project manager for Google, taught middle school in India, earned an M.A. in Learning Technology and Design at Stanford University, and designed and delivered massive open online courses (MOOCs) at Udacity in Silicon Valley. He describes a time when he was teaching science to middle school children in Delhi, India:
 

The way the school was set up, teachers had 30 minutes a week of preparation time to for a week's teaching effort, which could be up to four hours of classroom instruction. Can you imagine that — just a half-hour to plan for science learning for a week? That led the teachers to rely on the textbook, which I found was at best mediocre. For the students, that content was boring! They couldn’t wait to run out of the classroom and play games on their smartphones! This was painful learning for me. But it was also an "aha" moment that set me on a new course in life: there's got to be a way to make science learning exciting and engaging for young people everywhere. And if we can do that, think of the possibilities: new doors of opportunity could open for many, many children -- and maybe even new potential for accelerating the advancement of science!

Today Kunal is creating an on-line science school for children, with the initial content based on videos he's made during his travels through India and the U.S. He's calling it Chalees Min School. ("Chalees" = "40" in Hindi; "Min" = minutes"). The learning design: each lesson is 40 minutes -- a four-minute video to start, and the rest in interactive activities. You can enjoy some of the early videos at Chalees Min School.

Please join us for a conversation about learning at all levels -- from how children learn about the world, to how we learn at all stages of our lives to innovate and create new pathways!

Sunday, May 8, 2016 9:00 - 10:30 AM Pacific Time. You can find your corresponding local time at Time and Date.

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