Technology is causing a paradigm shift in education and learning around the world, bringing students closer together and allowing for the dissemination of knowledge on a scale not seen before.

The trick will be to harness that technology for the poorest sectors of society so that everyone ­– even the poorest children in remote areas – can benefit from this revolution.

Vint Cerf, known as one of the founders of the internet and now “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google, has seen this shift first hand.

Writing for Project Syndicate, Mr. Cerf notes that while teaching at Stanford University in the 1970s he used to send videotapes of his lectures to students within the San Francisco Bay area. Now, he says, teachers can upload their lectures onto the internet.

As well, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer courses for free to students around the world – as long as they have internet access.

Coursera is the largest MOOC provider with over 7 million registered users as of April 2014. This is impressive under any circumstance, but even more so considering it has been around for only two years. Coursera has partnered with 108 universities offering almost 700 courses. While English is the main language of instruction, there are a number of courses available in French, Chinese, Spanish and Russian.   Udacity and edX are two other popular MOOC providers.

MOOCS are proving extremely popular in India. Indian students comprise around 10% of the student body at Coursera, the second largest country representation. They are followed closely by Brazilians at around 5% and British students at 4% of total enrollment. Americans constitute about 30% of all Courserians.

While MOOCs are currently offered only at the University level, Mr. Cerf feels that it is only a matter of time before this type of resource is available for elementary and secondary education level users as well. This bodes well for countries that have difficulty in recruiting and training teachers, particularly in remote areas. MOOCs, he says, could supplement traditional teaching methods. This is sometimes called a “flipped classroom.”

Some governments in developing countries are getting on the MOOC bandwagon. Malaysia, for example, has committed to providing laptops for primary and secondary schools across the country.

“Governments must expand national infrastructure so that students in densely packed urban areas and remote rural villages alike can get online … Once students are online, there is no limit to what they can do with the vast amount of information available to them or how they will collaborate with and learn from one another.” Vint Cerf

Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England, prooves how easily children are able to teach themselves using technology. He won the 2013 Ted Prize for his “Hole in the wall” experiments. In his TedTalk, Sugata Mitra talks about transitioning schools from the Victorian model to teaching for the future. He promotes and idea called the “School in the Cloud” where children can teach themselves in what he calls a “self organized learning environment.”

Here is his Ted Talk from February 2013. As of April 2014, it has had 1.9 million views.

[ted id=1678]

Clearly, there is so much potential in finding new ways to bring schools and learning to children in developing nations so that they can build the skills necessary to create businesses and find jobs.

The 60 million girls Foundation believes strongly in the future importance of technology and learning for children in developing countries. To this end, we are pioneering a pilot project, called “self-directed computer-based learning in a rural environment”, in Kabala, Sierra Leone with our partner, CAUSE Canada. In the first phase of this project, we loaded USB flash drives with a math tutorial program called KA Lite. Currently, 60 high school girls are using the program. Our hope is that it will allow these students to improve their grasp of math concepts in a non-threatening environment where the girls can work autonomously.