TED Conferences have become a phenomenon in recent years. Everyday around 340,000 users visit www.ted.com website and monitor the speeches. On the platform there are many examples of effective and informative speeches that generally last less than 18 minutes. With its content which is free of charge, the website is a unique training and development resource.

Representing the initial letters of Technology, Entertainment and Design; first TED meeting was organized in 1984. Conferences started be organized annually after 1990 and the recorded sessions are published on the web since 2006. As of June 2013, 1.537 videos are uploaded on the web site with a varying content such as economy, health, education and technology.

Nowadays many users of the web site make “Top 10 TED Speeches” lists for the videos on the web site. In this post I would like to share with you my “Top 5 TED Videos for Trainers” list. In my opinion these videos should be watched to understand the future of training.

My first video suggestion is by Sir Ken Robinson, who is an expert in the field of creativity and education. In his talk “Schools Kill Creativity” Robinson discusses and challenges today’s education system. He suggests a radical rethink of our school systems to cultivate creativity. Video has been viewed over 17 million users as of June, 2013.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.htmlThe second video I would like to suggest is entitled “Let’s use video to reinvent education” and the speaker is Salman Khan. He is the founder and the faculty of the Khan Academy www.khanacademy.org – a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. In this video Khan talks about how and why he created the Khan Academy, he shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

The third video is a speech delivered by Peter Norvig, who is an expert on artificial intelligence and the Director of Research at Google Inc. In 2011; Norvig taught a class with Sebastian Thrun on artificial intelligence at Stanford attended by 175 students — and over 100,000 via an interactive webcast. In this speech he shares what he learned about teaching to a global classroom.
http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_norvig_the_100_000_student_classroom.html

My fourth suggestion is the video entitled “What we’re learning from online education” by Daphne Koller. She is a professor of Stanford University and is the co-founder of Coursera. www.coursera.org is a web site that broadcasts online and free courses from academicians of top colleges. In this video Koller shares what she has learned from her Coursera experience.
http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html

My last video suggestion is Sugata Mitra’s “Build a School in the Cloud”. In this speech Mitra talks about his project that made him win 2013 TED Prize wish. Mitra wants to design a School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other — using resources and mentoring from the Cloud. I strongly recommend you to watch this inspirational talk about SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environments) and his project.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

Resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference) 24.06.2013
http://ted.com.hypestat.com/ 24.06.2013