Everyone from everywhere can have access to high-quality knowledge they desire. Where education is seen as essential, shared and collaborative for social good to get people to live the life they wish and have their voice heard to solve local or global issues.
is a value, like diversity. We remove barriers, obstacles, frictions from pathways to learning for all.
Enables all to contribute with shared ownership and responsibilities.
Accomplishes a number of goals through education in religion, technology and economics.
is grounded in the principles of community organisations, fairness, justice, empowerment, participation and self-determination for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources between communities, institutions and corporations.
Our source for your learning comes from various point of views that stimulate your thinking. So teaching as a social activity will become broadly distributed in society and expertise is going to count as much or more than the formal role of a ‘teacher’.
Traditionally, learning only occurs within a fixed physical structure within a particular point of view about the relationship between instructor and learner, physical structures, organizational forms. At Madrasah Al Kahfi, we unlock these basic understanding of boundaries in learning and make it into a social activity as opposed to one that’s confined within an institutional setting.
The other type of learner we’re interested in is people who want to enable the learning of others. In some settings, we call those people teachers. In other settings, they might be called tutors, convenors. In order to build a powerful learning environment for the future of society, we are paying attention to both.
In a traditional definition of learning, we had this idea that learning had to be legitimate in terms of some authoritative source, in a fixed curriculum, in a fixed body of knowledge, in a fixed source. Go to the library. Go to the encyclopedia in a single classroom, in a single school, in a single building. The transformation that’s taking place now is that the sources of learning are everywhere. That is, knowledge is readily available through digital means from many, many possible sources.
The level at which you can engage in learning is now more dependent on what you’re interested in learning than someone else’s prescribed idea about where you should be in the learning process. There are multiple sources, multiple points of access, and much more flexibility in access to content and to knowledge.
There is a role for formal teachers in regular learning settings. Given the development of digital culture, our emphasis is more on where is the expertise that’s required to enable and support your learning? It can be in a lecture, it can be in a tutor or a mentor, or it can be just in a collection of sources that come from a variety of points of view that stimulate your thinking and provides you with exactly what you want to know.
So teaching as a social activity becomes broadly distributed in society and expertise is going to count as much or more than the formal role of a teacher in the process of learning.
We’ve always known that learners come into a learning situation with very different background experiences, very different background knowledge, very different interests and motivations, very different prior demonstrations of mastery.
We haven’t been able, in the past, to develop a very responsive environment for adapting to these individual differences. Because of the wide distribution of sources of learning and types of teachers, we have made learning much more personalized. It’s personalized in the sense of you’ll have many more opportunities to learn what you’re interested in learning. You’ll have opportunities to find programs that are much more adapted to where you start the learning process and what your individual needs are as a learner. And you’ll have many more opportunities to find people on whom you can rely as a learning partners who are pursuing your common interests.
If you think about a classroom as a container within which learning occurs, it’s physically constrained, and in most cases, it’s occupied for a certain period during the day. And it’s usually organized around a single adult who is the source of knowledge. In our approach, the structure of learning environments begins to migrate out into society. It’s much more formed around people with common interests and differences in expertise, much more like a network. Learning will occur 24/7, whenever you want to engage. Your fellow networkers don’t even have to be awake for you to interact with them. So learning is unconstrained by time and space. It’s much more participatory and much more voluntary. That is, people engage in learning with people who are equally interested and motivated and who have a common interest.
Because of the complexity of the work that’s required for innovation and creativity in society, learning can’t be contained in hierarchical organizations. So we have made learning to be much more compatible with the way the rest of society works, as opposed to more traditional ways of thinking about learning.
Learning will still occur in a formally bounded structure, schools and classrooms. But as it begins to creep out into society at large to become more widely distributed and to take place in networks, it will occur in coffee shops and libraries, in book clubs, in digital communities.
People can choose to engage them at their own convenience, and they don’t require a bounded type of organization that’s totally focused on learning in groups. No one knows what the result of these transformations is going to be. The question is not whether these things are going to happen, but how fast they’re going to happen, and how quickly and efficiently our ideas about how to organize learning are able to adapt to these changes in the way learning happens in society. And that’s one of the challenges, one of the exciting challenges that we’re going to try to get our hands around.
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