EdSurge Podcast

With every new generation of students there’s an effort to understand what’s different about them, and what motivates them as they enter society and the workforce. For Gen Z, a key factor is their skills in organizing on social media and interest in working across traditional partisan divides on issues like gun control, environmental protection and racial justice, argues Timothy Law Snyder, president of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who calls them the “solidarity generation.”

Two longtime professors hoped the pandemic would reset the small liberal arts colleges where they taught. So they wrote a book-length manifesto laying out a vision for making the colleges more accessible — and true engines of social mobility. Three years into the pandemic, they reflect on how that’s going.

A new documentary called 'The Right to Read' follows an educator and activist pushing to require schools to offer reading instruction that has been proven effective, calling it a matter of civil rights. But the main character in the film started out reluctant to participate. Here’s why, and what he hopes comes of the film.

EdSurge visited large lecture classes to get a sense of what college feels like now that COVID is more under control after years of pandemic disruptions. Students and professors say that years of remote instruction—often referred to as ‘Zoom University’—has left many students more likely to get distracted by their devices, or to place less value on class, thinking they can get whatever is happening in classrooms on their own.

Even before ChatGPT was released, AI experts were exploring how to detect language written by this new kind of bot. On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we talk with one of those experts, and others who are seeking to build guardrails to help educators successfully adapt to the latest AI technology.

Experts have described this as a 'golden age' of discovery in the area of learning science, with new insights emerging regularly on how humans learn. So what can educators, policymakers and any lifelong learner gain from these new insights?

A free-tuition online institution called University of the People has grown into a mega-college. Its founder and president says other colleges can learn from the model to drastically cut their costs.

Active-shooter drills are now common at schools and colleges. But the sometimes-intense simulations can be traumatic for some children, and some parents are asking to let their students opt out of the experiences.

Human brains are wired to think in ways that often lead to biased decisions or incorrect assumptions. A Yale University psychology professor has gathered highlights of what research says about the most common human thinking errors into a popular class at the university that she recently turned into a book.

The acclaimed author has a passion for working with students, but it’s one she has trouble putting into words. Maybe, she allows, it’s “like a chess grandmaster might play chess with a really brilliant 12-year-old and come close to losing — the experience is somehow pleasant in itself.”

Romanticized depictions of teaching in popular culture fail to capture the way teaching actually works — and they create an unattainable model that stifles the impact of teachers and professors, argues Jessamyn Neuhaus, who teaches courses about popular culture runs the Center of Teaching Excellence at the SUNY Plattsburgh.

Getting and holding the attention of students is more difficult since the pandemic, according to many college instructors around the country. So they’re looking for inspiration from other sectors — including video game design and elementary school classrooms — to keep lectures interesting.

Many professors are expressing frustration and even “terror” over ChatGPT, the latest AI tool that students may be using to write their papers for them. That has academic honor committees scrambling to revise policies and provide resources to instructors.

Schools are finding better ways to teach recent immigrant and refugee students. A new book by a high school history and civics teacher collects innovative strategies, and argues that getting the issue right is crucial for building a strong democracy.

Professors are finding that they can’t just go back to teaching as they did before the pandemic and expect the same result. It takes more these days to hold student attention, and convince them to show up. Check out part two of our series reported from the back of large lecture classes to see how teaching is changing.

A new AI chatbot can spit out long-form answers to just about any question, in a way that sounds eerily human. Students are already figuring out they can use it to write their essays, and educators are pondering how to adapt.

Is a college degree necessary these days? One father and son exemplify a generational difference when it comes to that question. Both dropped out of college in their 20s. Now dad is back in an online program, trying to finish. The son recently stopped college and isn’t sure if he’ll ever return. Listen to their debate at the end of this reissued episode of our Second Acts series on returning adult college students.

EdSurge visited large lecture classes to get a sense of what college feels like now that COVID is more under control after years of pandemic disruptions. Students and professors say that years of remote instruction—often referred to as ‘Zoom University’—has left many students more likely to get distracted by their devices, or to place less value on class, thinking they can get whatever is happening in classrooms on their own.

These days many teachers are documenting their lives on podcasts, Instagram or other social media. It all adds up to a kind of virtual teacher’s lounge. But as EdSurge Voices of Change writing fellow Patrick Harris II found out, sharing raw details of your teaching life online can bring big challenges, as well as unusual opportunities.

What if you could travel 20 years into the future and visit a model high school of that time? That’s the premise of a book called “Running with Robots,” whose authors paint a hopeful future, though they say it will take effort and vision to avoid pitfalls around problems like privacy and algorithmic bias.

The SAT can feel very different to different students. While it can give any college applicant stress, some low-income and minority students see it as evidence that selective colleges don't want them. Can the rise of test-optional policies lead to a new, more equitable era of college admissions? This episode, part of our Bootstraps series on who gets what opportunities in education, first ran last December.

One of the most selective college scholarship programs in the U.S. could wind down in the next few years if it doesn’t raise a substantial sum to shore up its endowment. While many scholarships were founded and funded by billionaires or governments, this one was started by a first-generation college student living firmly in the middle class. Will she find a donor to help continue the work?

You may remember the announcement one year ago today of a new private university in Texas that hoped to better promote civil discourse and viewpoint diversity—to avoid what its leaders see as a “liberal bias” on most campuses that they say leads to groupthink rather than free and open inquiry. It turns out, this fledgling university, the University of Austin, has been quietly working on raising money and finding land for the campus—and testing out its unusual model.

What if you gathered a group of high school students in New York City, gave them fancy microphones and some training, and challenged them to make an investigative podcast about the issues they cared about the most? That’s the premise of a nonprofit called The Bell, started in 2017 by two former teachers with a journalism background and a belief that one way to improve education is to elevate the voices of students.

People who happen to be good at school and college are often described as ‘smart,’ and our systems tend to reward them with cultural status and good jobs. But what if the key to expanding educational access comes down to rethinking our concept of smarts and who has them? We talk with Freddie deBoer, author of “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice.”

There are many metaphors of edtech out there, and sometimes we might not even realize the metaphor is there. After all, ‘online lecture’ is a metaphor. EdSurge talked with a professor who just put out a book on how metaphors shape our views of education technology.

An evolutionary biologist who studies the physiology of aging has some surprising advice about brain health. And it has implications for schools and colleges—and anyone interested in learning.

What should the college career center look like in this moment of seismic shifts in the job market and the economy, and growing skepticism of whether going to college pays off? We talked with two professors who edited the new book “Mapping the Future of Undergraduate Career Education.”

Longtime professor Cathy Davidson is on a mission these days to promote the practice of active learning. And she says the stakes are higher than people might realize. It’s not just about test scores and whether people learn. She thinks there’s an ethical issue that sometimes gets lost in discussions about teaching.

There's a big difference between being nearly done with college and getting that diploma. In the finale of our Second Acts podcast series, we learn whether the three students we’ve been following finished their degrees, and what the distinction of college grad means to them at this point in their lives.

It’s back-to-school season, but not every teacher opted to return. This week, we listen in on a frank conversation between Jennifer Yoo-Brannon, an instructional coach in California, and Diana Bell, a veteran teacher of more than 18 years who recently decided to leave the profession.

Some big state universities have decided to get into online learning with a big splash, by buying an existing online college that already serves thousands of online students. What does it say about the future of online education, both at colleges and schools?

Millions of U.S. adults have attended some college but never finished a degree. What does it take to get them back in class? And once they’re back, how can colleges help them stay on track? In the second episode of our podcast series Second Acts, we hear the in-depth stories of three students who returned to finish a degree.

It’s easier than you might think to pay someone to write a term paper for you. A former homework-for-hire writer, Dave Tomar, shares the details of this booming industry in a new book, “The Complete Guide to Contract Cheating in Higher Education.” What does the popularity of these services say about our education system? And what can be done?

Taryn Southern is a pioneering YouTuber who these days experiments with how cutting edge tech might transform human expression. She’s recorded a pop album that she co-wrote with some AI code, for instance, and she’s created a digital clone of herself that she can use to make videos for her popular YouTube channel. Here's what she sees coming for education.

As an instructional coach, Jennifer Yoo-Brannon’s conversations with educators have gotten increasingly difficult this year. Rather than coping, she argues that her hope for every educator is to find a community of resistance when they need it. She says what education really needs is for teachers to flock together, affirm each other’s experiences and resist together.

Bad experiences and feelings of disengagement in middle and high school can haunt students even as they enter college. That, plus a number of other factors, explain why millions of students have left college without a degree. In the first episode of a new podcast series we’re calling Second Acts, we hear the in-depth stories of three students who walked away from post-secondary education and are now back to finish a degree.

What if schools and colleges ditched letter grades and GPAs? That’s the key question in this episode of our Bootstraps podcast series about who gets what opportunities in American education. It first ran last fall and was out most popular episode of the past year.

Three educators who were part of EdSurge's first Voices of Change Writing Fellowship share how personal, narrative essay writing can help learners and leaders reshape our world.

It’s worth taking a closer look at how the systems we live in -- including our education systems -- make us feel about ourselves and our connections with our fellow citizens. That's one key point in an award-winning philosophy paper by Waheed Hussain, and In today’s highly polarized environment, his framework for thinking about ethics in education seems more relevant and important than ever.

If you ask middle school and high school students these days the most important skills they’re learning, they’re likely to name something they picked up on their own, outside of normal school hours. That’s according to Julie Evans, CEO of the nonprofit Project Tomorrow, who has been studying what she calls "free agent learning" for years—both before and after the pandemic.

Talk of the metaverse is suddenly everywhere, but what does that mean for education? To help us sort through this emerging space, we talked with two guests who have seen more of this VR space than most in both K12 and at colleges. This conversation was recorded live at the ISTE Live conference in New Orleans.

What can today’s activists and educators fighting for equity in computer science and the tech industry learn from past civil-rights struggles in America? That was one question posed during the recent Black Tech Policy Week event hosted by the Black Tech Futures Research Institute. EdSurge was invited to moderate a session, which we're bringing you as this week's podcast episode.

Who gets to learn about computer science in school? Though more schools these days offer CS classes, they’re more common in well-resourced schools than those that serve underprivileged students. Hoping to spark discussions among kids about equity issues in the tech industry, two scholars studying the issue recently made the unusual decision to produce a graphic novel based on their research. For this week’s episode, we talked to the authors about the new book.

In the last few years, the landscape of media for youngsters has gone through a transformation. Now kids watch videos on tablets and on their parents phones, and there’s been an explosion of content on YouTube and other social media platforms aimed at little ones. One preschool-teacher-turned-kids-show-host worries about the forces shaping the industry these days, and he’s been talking to a range of kids-media experts to get their advice on a way forward.

Jackie Kim is on a quest to launch a career in acting and stunts, make it big in the movies—oh, and finish her college degree. She’s one of millions of adults who left higher ed before earning the credential they originally planned for. Now she is starring in her university’s spring production of a play packed with sword fights and monsters, learning how to balance risk and safety on stage and in life.

This week, we’re digging into this issue of teen sleep, and looking at the latest in the brain science and the policy debate over school start times. Our guest is Lisa Lewis, an education journalist turned advocate who is out with a new book, “The Sleep-Deprived Teen: Why Our Teenagers Are So Tired, and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive.”

A repeat of an episode from 2021, which recently won an Azbee Award: An online course at Concordia University is being taught by a legend of Canadian art -- well, by video lectures he recorded years ago. But a student in the course said he was surprised to find that even though the professor died in 2019, he's still listed as the teacher on the syllabus. What can we learn from this unusual moment in online teaching?

America is getting more and more diverse. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the makeup of public-school teachers, who are overwhelmingly white. This week, we look at research into new approaches to attracting and retaining teachers of color.

It’s still popular to prize students who have “grit,” who overcome tough odds to succeed. A new book by Alissa Quart called “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream,” looks at why this narrative is so hard to shake—and proposes more community-minded alternatives that could improve equity. We dive into the book in this bonus episode of our Bootstraps podcast series.