Imagining a World without Schools with Emily Church

In this week’s episode Emily shares her experience working and parenting at a time when schools are closed indefinitely. Even without this pandemic, Emily reflects on how a world without schools is a reality for many parents and children around the world.

Dr. Emily Musil Church is the Executive Director of Education & Learning at XPRIZE, where she led the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE, and leads XPRIZE’s educational outreach and equity programs. Prior to joining XPRIZE, she spent over a decade in academia, where as a professor she specialized in human rights, global development, and gender equity. Emily has a Ph.D. from UCLA, is a Fulbright scholar, and she served on the OECD’s Senior Advisory Group for Blended Finance, and the Advisory Board of the Center for Technology & Workforce Solutions. She's a mom to two young children, and is also a public speaker and is published in numerous outlets including Scientific American, International Policy Digest, Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, and Huffington Post.

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, over 260 million children—that’s 1 out of 5 —were out of school. Even when you include children who do attend schools, more than half of all children globally are not able to read by age 12. Add onto those numbers the additional over 950 million children out of school due to COVID-19, and it is clear that the future of learning must be a future that includes learning when traditional schools are not an option.

Being in quarantine has given me a new light on my time leading the Global Learning XPRIZE, a competition that encouraged teams to create adaptive, learning software that helped kids teach themselves reading, writing and basic math. The software had to be intuitive, cutting- edge, AND be able to work off-line.

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Links

Global Learning XPRIZE - https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning

Code Games Challenge - https://www.codegamechallenge.org

https://www.xprize.org/articles/introducing-a-new-podcast

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