EdSurge Podcast

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.

A new effort is trying to bring a fresh approach to gifted education, and it doesn't take place in a school building. Instead, it works either as a project-based homeschool curriculum and support system, or as an unusual boarding school option that involves a kind of educational road trip. How does it fit into broader debates about the future of gifted programs?

One big theme in education innovation circles is that the professional world is changing faster than ever, and so schools and colleges have to change what and how they teach to meet those changing needs. For one college in St. Louis, that means experimenting with revamping its liberal-arts curriculum, and even changing its business model.

At a recent education event, two devoted educators debated the question: Is a university degree the worst investment a young person can make? The discussion turned on a bigger question: What exactly is higher education for?

Many classroom environments favor a certain kind of thinker, usually the students who are quick to recall a fact when the instructor asks a question. But that’s not the only type of mind, and it’s not even always the best kind of mind for learning, says Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University who works at translating the latest brain research into practical advice for teachers and learners.

The cost of college keeps climbing, and these days colleges are considering all kinds of innovative alternatives to offer affordable options. But one liberal-arts college recently announced a radical new approach that does away with the idea of tuition altogether and instead counts on something else: gratitude.

The false choice between personal growth or a decent paycheck isn’t serving teenagers well. Young people want more than good livelihoods. They want good lives. On this podcast extra, we bring you the results of a year-long research projects into how to better design college-to-career pathways.

The 15-year old who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last summer is no stranger to victory, having previously won three Guinness World Records for very non-academic feats. We sat down with Zaila Avant-garde to hear what's next -- and we challenged her to show off her spelling skills on the spot.

Burned out, tired, demoralized, at a breaking point. Spend time with educators these days in K-12 or higher ed and phrases such as these will come up often. For those in classrooms and for school leaders, the challenge is how to meet the many needs of educators during this time—social, emotional, intellectual and ethical.

What happens when a venture capitalist who funds edtech companies faces off with an edtech critic about what role AI should play in education? We found out, in this discussion between professor Neil Selwyn and venture-fund founder Ryan Craig.

The Rhodes Scholarship was designed to forge a network of people who would go on to rule the world. So who gets this opportunity? And how is the oldest and best-known graduate scholarship dealing with the legacy of its founder, who used ruthless and racist practices to build the diamond empire that funded the effort?

Philosopher and historian of technology Justin E. H. Smith has been diving into the past to see where our dreams about the internet have come from. And he has a warning for what he thinks is going wrong in how things have evolved in recent years — and what tech might be doing to us as learners and thinkers. Understanding that past, he argues, can help make a course correction.

Even though the metaverse is not really here yet, some educators are already trying to get ahead of the curve to help influence what kinds of education products and services emerge in this new, more-immersive internet.

There are universities aiming to do top-notch research and serve large numbers of students of color and low-income students. This goal—what some campus leaders call ‘inclusive excellence’—challenges common assumptions about prestige in education. And according to the authors of the book “Broke,” it’s hard to accomplish in a time of reduced state support for public colleges.

Clay Shirky has long been an influential voice on how technology is impacting society. These days the NYU professor has been weighing in on where higher ed is headed, with a newsletter called "The (Continual) Transformation of Higher Education."

A group of researchers at Harvard have a unique window into student well-being during the pandemic, following a group of a couple thousand families with young children in Massachusetts. They're seeing more behavior issues in kids during remote learning, and they have advice for educators on how to manage shifts back and forth between online and in-person teaching.

A polio outbreak in 1937 may have been the first time tech made emergency remote learning possible. There was no Internet, of course, so schools used the big medium of the day: radio. But did that leave any lasting impact on schooling? That's one question explored by education historian Larry Cuban in his new book, Confessions of a School Reformer.

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.

Last semester has been described as a kind of limbo—with fewer COVID health restrictions and more in-person classes and activities, but still under the cloud of a stubborn pandemic. We asked students on five campuses around the country to share moments that epitomized this unusual time on college campuses.

Sometime early in elementary school, kids are put on one of two paths: regular or gifted. Where did this idea come from? The answer goes back more than a 100 years, to a once-famous scholar named Lewis Terman. And it turns out his legacy, and the future of gifted programs, are still very much under debate.

Back in 2004 Google made a splash with a plan to scan nearly the entire book collections of some of the world's largest libraries. But soon it became clear the actual plan would turn out to be far more controversial than its organizers probably ever imagined.

Low morale of professors and college leaders is turning out to be one of the biggest issues in higher ed this year. We talked with a college leader who has been writing about educator burnout and demoralization for EdSurge, Kevin McClure, about how higher education can get out of its current funk.

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? | Guest reporter: Eric Hoover, of The Chronicle of Higher Education

Khan Academy has grown from a grassroots phenomenon on YouTube to a non-profit with a mission to change education. Its big idea is to promote a notion of mastery learning, where students don't move on until they understand each step through a curriculum. We asked Sal Khan how that broader goal of making mastery learning mainstream is going, and what's next for Khan Academy.

Could the pandemic be a moment that competency-based education catches on more widely. It's an approach where colleges award degrees based on what students can show they know, rather than how long they've spent in a classroom. Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, talks about his new book about the approach, called Students First: Equity, Access and Opportunity in Higher Education.

Scientists agree that climate change is real and extremely pressing. But many kids in the U.S. aren’t so sure—even ones who have experienced its effects firsthand. The problem may be what’s taught (or isn’t taught) in today’s schools. Climate author Katie Worth takes us through her new book “Miseducation,” and what successful schools are doing to combat misinformation.

Free online courses have become big business in recent years, offered by companies that work to upsell learners to paid products. But that's not how they started out. Stephen Downes, a pioneer of open online education, argues for eliminating things like free registration to get to free course materials, to better spread the ideas.

You’re probably hearing a lot about the crisis in early childhood education these days, as Congress is on the cusp the biggest policy change — and investment — in early childhood in decades. On today’s podcast, we want to step back and look at how we got here -- at what the situation means to educators at all levels and for parents, and at what the Biden Administration’s proposals could mean.

You may remember the hype about 10 years ago when a new approach to online teaching with technology was touted as a possible alternative to traditional college, called MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, led by startups like Coursera. These days you don’t hear much about them, but they never went away—in fact they’ve boomed since the pandemic. So much so that one professor thinks that higher ed should probably be nervous—or at least that colleges should try to learn something from these well-funded efforts.

We all make mistakes. But for educators, mistakes can be particularly challenging, since there’s a culture in education that prizes showing teachers at their best, and glossing over some of the biggest challenges. One educator has set out to change that, with a podcast that asks teachers to share their biggest mistake and how they've learned from it.

Our current grading system can be a way for kids to prove themselves and win college scholarships, or admission to selective colleges. It can also be a barrier, in sometimes surprising ways. What might a world without letter grades and GPAs look like?

Robots are having a moment—including the announcement last week of a new home robot by Amazon. What could that mean for education? We talked with Neil Selwyn, a research professor at Monash University in Australia and author of the provocative book "Should Robots Replace Teachers?"

Meet a U.S. educator who has been tutoring students in China for years from her basement closet, only to have a policy change cut her off from her students. On this week's episode, we dig into a drama playing out in the online tutoring market half a world away, and look at how it's having huge repercussions for many educators in the U.S.