EdSurge Podcast

A growing number of fast-food restaurants have added free or heavily-subsidized college education options for their workers. But how well do these new benefits work in practice? And what kinds of people do they best serve? In the first of a two-part series, we look at how tech is changing low-wage work—and what one author sees as obstacles to these new education-as-a-benefit programs.

A few years ago, after more two decades in the classroom, Chrissy Romano-Arribito began to experience something that may sound familiar to a lot of teachers: burnout. Or not burnout, exactly, but demoralization. Experts like Bowdoin College education chair Doris Santoro, author of the book “Demoralized,” note that as systemic pressure, such as top-down initiatives or punitive evaluation systems, crowd out teacher autonomy, they feel they can no longer tap into what “makes their work morally good.”

College kids have a reputation for seeking out free food, and that's why any student organizer knows that ordering pizza is a good way to lure folks to a meeting. But for many students, hunger is a more serious problem. Many campus leaders are trying new ways to address the problem of 'food insecurity' on campus—which can impact professors as well as students.

Back in 2005, one of the biggest stories in tech was a push by a group of MIT professors to build a $100 laptop and give them to children in schools around the world. It was presented as a feel-good story that no one could object to. The story of how these laptops grew into a cultural phenomenon, what their educational impact was, and of what happened to them after they faded from public discussion, is the subject of a new book by Morgan Ames, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.

Computing experts love speed races, and there’s an ongoing battle to build the fastest computer on earth. Usually the overall trend follows what’s known as Moore’s Law, with the speed of the fastest computer doubling every 14 months or so. But last week saw the announcement of a new kind of speed record. A team of scientists from Google said they used a quantum computer to solve a problem in less than four minutes that would have taken a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. What could quantum computing mean for education?

In 1995, NASA astronaut Dr. Bernard Harris became the first African American to perform a spacewalk, and he has spent more than 18 days in space. Today, he's the CEO of NMSI, the National Math and Science Initiative, which runs programs designed to boost the number of STEM teachers. We talked with Dr. Harris about his mission to bring in culturally responsive teaching in STEM, and we asked what it's like to go to space (and what space food really tastes like.)

Researchers are making new discoveries these days about how people learn, and some of those findings are making their way onto campus, in the form of new teaching practices. That has Matthew Rascoff, associate vice provost for digital education and innovation at Duke University, excited about the possibility to make wide-scale improvements in how colleges teach.

What does it mean to be a good citizen? That question is complicated by today's digital environment, since today's kids—and adults too—live in both online and offline worlds. EdSurge sat down with one of the foremost experts on helping navigate these issues: Marialice Curran, founder and executive director of the Digital Citizenship Institute. Curran suggests some simple things anyone can do to be a better citizen, both on and offline.

Today we’re talking about teaching using popular culture, and we’re focusing on a quirky TV comedy called The Good Place. The show is led by Michael Schur, who previously wrote for The Office and Parks and Recreation. But there’s an unusual person in the writer’s room of The Good Place—an academic philosopher from Clemson University, professor Todd May—one of our guests today. But can a network sitcom accurately teach concepts like existentialism and the works of Plato and Kant? And how much should colleges use pop culture in their courses?

This week on the podcast we’re talking about news literacy, and the challenge of teaching students to navigate the relentless flow of information they get through social media and websites and YouTube and ... podcasts. Our guest, Peter Adams, has years of experience working with students like Luquin, first as a classroom teacher, then as a college instructor, and currently as senior vice president for education at the News Literacy Project.

What happens when a popular theory of market research used by fast-food restaurants (to do things like improve their milkshakes) is applied to the process of choosing a college? We talked to Michael Horn, co-author of a new book that does just that. But does it make sense to bring a theory from dollar-menu items to higher education?

For this week’s podcast, we’re looking at the role that African-American scholars and teachers have played in preserving the history of slavery and its aftermath, which in so many ways is still not widely known and appreciated. We talk with scholars who helped mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in what would become America. Episode page: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-09-17-the-fight-to-preserve-and-teach-african-american-history

This week we’re talking about cybersecurity at schools—and how secure—or in some cases how vulnerable—the tech systems in school systems are. At the center of our story: Bill Demirkapi, who managed to bust into two key student information systems of his high school, then tried to tell the edtech companies to get them to fix their software—with mixed results. Episode page: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-09-10-a-bored-student-hacked-his-school-s-systems-will-the-edtech-industry-pay-attention

What is your favorite satirical take on higher education? Maybe Jane Smiley’s "Moo." Or Don DeLillo’s "White Noise"? Or it could be Rodney Dangerfield’s "Back to School." Let’s face it, there almost endless works of fiction poking fun at academic life. As the summer ends and we head into the fall semester, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate this rich tradition of parody of academic life, and look at what these works say about the big challenges facing higher education today. For this episode, we talk to three different writing professors with something to say about satire. One is the author of an acclaimed academic satire. Another did an unusual work of satire on Twitter to call attention to the plight of adjuncts. And the third has a suggestion for the academic satire that he wishes someone out there would write. Episode page: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-09-03-satirical-takes-on-higher-ed-and-why-they-matter Julie Schumacher's recommended works of campus satire: Don DeLillo, "White Noise" David Lodge, Campus Trilogy Lan Samantha Chang, "All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost" John Warner's recommended works of campus satire: David Lodge, Campus Trilogy (his favorites are the first two, "Changing Places" and "Small World") Richard Russo, "Straight Man" Francine Prose, "Blue Angel"

What if teaching the scientific method in schools is giving students the wrong idea about how rigorous work is done by scientists? That’s the unusual hypothesis being made by John Rudolph, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “How We Teach Science: What's Changed, and Why It Matters.” We sat down with Rudolph to talk about the fascinating history of teaching the subject in the U.S., and why we’re still searching for the right approach. Episode page: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-08-27-should-schools-teach-the-scientific-method-new-book-says-maybe-not

People have a tendency to treat technology and big data as neutral, sterile and immune to mortal failings. Yet the digital tools we use at schools, jobs and home don’t simply fall from the sky—humans produce them. And that means human biases can and do slip right into the algorithms. We talked with Ruha Benjamin, associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of new book “Race After Technology.” She points out that some people’s fantasies are other people’s nightmares.

When you hear the word “inventor,” you might think of household names like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or the Wright brothers. But today, there are plenty of young inventors whose names you’ve never heard of—not yet, anyway. These are middle and high school students who have developed solutions to major economic and social challenges, ranging from health care and transportation to agriculture and the environment. Leigh Estabrooks, invention education officer at the Lemelson-MIT program, thinks all students—no matter their GPAs or ZIP codes or learning challenges—can be inventors.

Parents are giving up custody of their kids to get need-based college financial aid. That was a headline last week in ProPublica Illinois, and it got people talking once again about the madness around college admissions. In comments on the ProPublica article and in other online forums, though, plenty of people chimed in expressing sympathy for these Chicago-area parents, calling their move a clever solution to an overwhelming challenge facing their children. To these commenters, the real problem is the high cost of college and what they see as unfair rules around how much parents are expected to contribute.

One of the most popular topics these days in education is mastery learning—the idea that the pace of a class should match what each student is ready to learn, as a way to ensure they’re really grasping material. But it can be hard to show educators what mastery learning looks like in practice. Cara Johnson has extensive experience both teaching and helping others using the approach. She talked with EdSurge about how she reaches parents and skeptical students—and shares her best tips for a successful mastery classroom.

What if you could map every book and article assigned in college courses around the world and see which authors are making the most impact? A project run out of Columbia University is working to do just that. It’s called the Open Syllabus Project, and this month its leaders released a new version of their tool that analyzes assignment lists from more than six million syllabi. But there could be unintended consequences.

Online tutoring is big business—especially for a growing number of companies that connect native English-speaking teachers with children in China for live video lessons. These services can work really well as second jobs teachers in the U.S., who can wake up early and get in a couple of hours of tutoring before going to their classroom jobs. But some teachers say they’ve wound up facing unexpected encounters, as they’ve witnessed parents engage in harsh physical discipline on screen that some describe as abusive. So what do you do when you’ve seen something like this? And what should the companies who run these tutoring services do? Read the full story at http://bit.ly/tutoringconcerns

For most of us, hearing something just once isn’t nearly enough to commit it to memory. But with today’s crowded curriculum, sometimes one explanation is all kids get. Ten years ago, Sal Khan set out to change that with his Khan Academy videos, which let kids replay lessons as many times as they want. EdSurge sat down with Khan to discuss his vision for reinventing schools, his recent focus on testing and what he thinks about the recent stumbles of AltSchool, a nearby network of tech-driven independent schools.

“Impact investing” is a term that has become increasingly trendy. And one of the largest higher-ed foundations—The Lumina Foundation—is getting in the game. John Duong, managing director of Lumina Impact Ventures, explains how venture capital supports its mission to drive better postsecondary outcomes, and why “impact-washing” (a spin on whitewashing) is increasingly becoming a concern.

This week’s podcast features an unlikely education leader. His name is Anthony Johnson, and the title of his book explains the unlikely part: it’s called High School Dropout to Teacher of the Year. Johnson’s story is about second chances and falling in love, the surprising parallels between his work as a correctional officer and his work as an educator and what it means to reinvent the system that failed him. Listen here.

Plenty of groups these days are trying to reinvent college. There are entrepreneurs and foundations rushing to try to offer higher education in new shapes, sizes, formats and price points. Meanwhile at colleges, researchers and innovators are diving into learning science and experimenting with new teaching methods as well. But those groups don’t always talk to each other, or even know about each other are working on. This week on the podcast we talk with Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford University sociology professor who wants to create more 'connective tissue' among these disparate groups.

In Louisiana, educators have to worry about privacy when it comes to technology. The state has perhaps the most restrictive data-privacy law in the country when it comes to education, where violators can be punished by up to six months in prison or $10,000 in fines. EdSurge sat down with Kim Nesmith, director of data governance, privacy, and edtech for the Louisiana Department of Education, to talk about the strictest student data privacy law in the country—and what it takes to help Louisiana educators face their fears and offer technology services to students and families in spite of that law (and with a healthy awareness of privacy).

“Someone should create a Center for Social Solutions, identify a handful of challenges and try to work on them over the next decade.” That directive guided professor, historian and author Earl Lewis to start just such a center at the University of Michigan. EdSurge sat down with Lewis to talk about how the center is using research to tackle some of the biggest challenges our world faces today.

At a time when more than 7 in 10 transgender students face bullying or harassment over their gender identity, some advocates are trying to buck the troubling trend and create more inclusive environments for students. Advocates Becca Mui and Vanessa Ford share their thoughts on gender-neutral bathrooms, tackling bullying and how every school can prioritize safety for all students.

"I no longer think there's a huge difference between for-profit and public higher education," Tweeted George Siemens, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and a longtime observer of tech in higher education. "Sit in enough faculty meetings, meet with enough leadership, and it becomes clear that it's all about money." The argument got some pushback from others who disagreed, so we reached out to Siemens and others in the conversation to hear them out.

It's hard for students, professors or even journalists to get a glimpse of just how much data colleges collect on students these days as they go about their coursework. That didn’t stop Bryan Short, who was a student at the University of British Columbia in 2016 when he got curious to know what information the learning management system at his university had collected on him and how it was being used. And what he found—that is, once he got a hold of it—left him feeling pretty uneasy.

Artificial intelligence is changing things—or, the people who are building the algorithms and technologies behind artificial intelligence are. And one of the challenges with bias in Artificial Intelligence tends to come down to who has access to these careers in the first place, and that's the area that Tess Posner, CEO of the nonprofit AI4All, is trying to address. EdSurge sat down with Posner, who told us about how her organization works with diverse youth to introduce them to AI fields and careers.

Bernard Bull has long been a champion of experimental higher ed models. And one of his biggest inspirations throughout his career has been a tiny college in Vermont called Goddard College. And one day Bull got offered a dream job as president of Goddard. But there was one catch. As he went through the interview process, he found out the famed college is broke, and in danger of closing. We asked Bull how he hopes to turn things around.

In the last few years, terms like “whole child” and “social-emotional learning” have become buzzwords. But behind the buzzwords are programs, often led and managed by schools, that take into account all the different things a child needs to be able to learn and grow, even if those things reach outside the traditional roles of a school. EdSurge sat down with Christina Cipriano, the director of research at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a research scientist at the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine.

Hollywood comedies like last year's Life of the Party portray adult students as fish out of water in higher education. But the reality is that these students are in the majority these days, often taking online programs or new offerings designed to serve them. We talk with Marie Cini, president of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, a group working to support programs for these so-called nontraditional students, the real-life versions of the character played by Melissa McCarthy in Life of the Party.

Teaching isn’t a simple one-way exchange. Often there are lessons to be learned from the very act of teaching, whether it’s an instructor finding new ways to reach—or not reach—students, to watching students grow before your eyes to discovering what makes collaborative learning so successful. Those are some of the examples educators shared with us on this week’s podcast.

There’s a boom in the number of grad degrees and certificates being awarded these days, especially as more colleges have moved to offer degrees online. And these degrees are now offered in different shapes and sizes, and in some cases at the faction of the price of in-person degrees. To help understand this shifting landscape, EdSurge sat down with Sean Gallagher, who has written a book on the future of university credentials, and runs a center at Northeastern University that tracks this area.

The college admissions scandal, which the FBI codenamed Varsity Blues, has raised questions about the fairness and validity of the admissions process as a whole, and specifically about whether the SAT is as secure as it should be. EdSurge sat down with Jeremy Singer, president of the College Board, the group that administers the SAT, to ask how the group is responding, and what it felt like to get the call that the test had been gamed in this way.

It’s easy to think of the ways that technology can make humans feel alienated or alone. But technology has also brought people—and teachers and students—together in new ways that have inspired learning. This is the third episode of a four part series about why teachers teach called “Teachable Moments.” We'll hear directly from educators who attended the EdSurge Fusion conference last fall about the challenges they face, and what brings them joy in teaching.

Writing is more important than ever, but today’s students are lousy at it. And John Warner, an author, book columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and longtime writing instructor, has some ideas about why that is, and how to fix it. EdSurge talked with Warner recently about his sometimes surprising ideas about the crisis in writing instruction, including why he thinks FitBits are part of the problem.

It’s often said that teaching and learning doesn’t always take place in the classroom. And the same is true for educators, whose teaching philosophies can be shaped by lessons that come from being a parent or coach, traveling abroad, or advancing into a new role. That was the case for four teachers featured on episode two of our four-part series on why teachers teach.

Maria Klawe is on a mission to bring more diversity to tech, and she's made progress as president of Harvey Mudd College, which is known as a powerhouse in engineering and computer science. But she isn’t declaring victory. In fact, she is the first to say she hasn’t done enough to make sure computer science is welcoming to all groups, including people of color. Here's why—and why she says the effort may never end.

When students struggle, so do educators. That’s why this week on the podcast, we hear from four educators who remember a time when they faced difficulty with an issue or a student, but overcame that struggle to find a positive outcome. This episode is the first of a four-part series we’re launching in partnership with Listenwise about why teachers teach, called Teachable Moments.

Maria Konnikova doesn’t buy the 10,000 hour rule—that theory popularized by Malcolm Gladwell that it takes at least 10,000 hours of serious practice to become a world-class expert at an activity. She believes she’s found a way to short-circuit it, and it involves marshmallows and poker. We sat down Konnikova, a bestselling author and contributing writer for The New Yorker, this week at SXSW EDU.

Many children grow up looking up to and learning from the characters they read about in books. But what about the kids who can’t find any characters that look like them? This week on the podcast, Ebony Thomas, a children’s literature researcher and critic, describes her own experiences with this, and explains why there are still so few protagonists of color in children’s books today.

Much has changed since 2012 or, as the New York Times dubbed, the “Year of the MOOC.” Where are these online course providers today—and how are universities responding? At this month’s EdSurge meetup, experts weighed in on the state of MOOCs in 2018. One thorny issue: Confusion over different micro-credentials and what they exactly signal to employers. Here’s what else they had to say.

There’s a lot we don’t know about how the brain works. But scientists are finding out more everyday—like how empathy can affect learning and student outcomes. This weekend, EdSurge caught up with John Medina, an affiliate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Here’s why the molecular biologist says teachers should be “the cognitive neuroscientists of learning.”

Inspired by the breakout podcast Serial, a few years ago two digital learning leaders at the University of Central Florida created their own podcast—focused on online learning instead of true crime. It’s called the Teaching Online Podcast, or TOPcast, and co-host Thomas Cavanagh says he is driven by his quest to figure out one of the grand challenges of higher education: how to use technology to raise the quality of instruction while lowering costs. Not everyone thinks that’s possible, of course, and even Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning at the University of Central Florida, admits that edtech can spark plenty of new ethical challenges along the way. Each month, he and co-host Kelvin Thompson executive director of the Center for Distributed Learning at UCF, give their analysis of trends in online learning over a cup of fancy coffee—and these days their fans often send them beans to brew and fuel the show. EdSurge connected with Cavanagh (online of course) to talk about what he has learned from all those podcast chats, and about how his sidegig as a detective novelist shapes his work in campus innovation.

Just how do humans learn? And can science unlock secrets of the learning process that can help teachers and professors be more effective in their classrooms? One of the latest people to tackle those questions is Josh Eyler, in a new book called How Humans Learn. But as Eyler warns readers at the outset, he’s not a scientist himself, but a humanist with a PhD in Medieval studies. And it turns out that is what makes the book such an interesting and unusual take on what is becoming a hot topic. Eyler certainly spends a lot of time thinking about teaching these days, since his day job is now the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University. And while his book offers plenty of practical tips, it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. By offering a guided tour of a variety of theories on the question of human learning, he may just cause you to rethink what teaching even is. We talked with Eyler about what surprised him most as he dove into the topic, and what he sees as examples of great teaching.

Listen to the EdSurge On Air podcast? We want to hear from you! Fill out this five-minute survey, and you can enter to win a $100 Amazon gift card. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/edsurgepodcast What’s life like after quitting a tenured job as a professor to become a freelance educator, making video courses and podcasts for a living? That’s one question we had for Kevin deLaplante, who did just that when he left Iowa State University in 2015 to focus on running his Argument Ninja Podcast and teaching courses on his online Critical Thinker Academy, both aimed at bringing concepts from his scholarship to a popular audience. One area he’s exploring these days is the rise of tribalism in U.S. politics and culture, and how it’s leading to polarization that is making it hard for us to talk to each other. He’s arguing for a new kind of “tribal literacy,” so we can better understand how humans are hard-wired to be drawn to certain tribal behaviors that, in too large a dose, can lead to trouble for societies. He says that, perhaps surprisingly, he has more time now and can explore the topic more broadly than when he was a traditional scholar. He made the move during a rush of enthusiasm for so-called MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, that big-name colleges were starting to offer low-cost higher education to a wider audience. It looked like there was going to be a big realignment. But the big shiny revolution didn’t exactly happen. So we also asked deLaplante what he thinks about the broader landscape of online education that he’s part of.

Should we build robot teachers, or even robot teaching assistants? And if so, what’s the right mix of man and machine in the classroom? To get a fresh perspective on that question, this episode we take you to China, where a couple of us from EdSurge recently traveled for a reporting trip. One of the events we peeked in on was a two-day conference about artificial intelligence in education organized by a company called Squirrel AI. It’s vision felt unusually utopian. The company’s co-founder, Derek Li, said during a keynote that replacing some teaching functions with AI-powered software would supercharge the country’s education system. Speaking to a crowd of some 2,000 attendees, he said, quote, “If our children are educated by AI teachers, then their potential can be fully realized.” He mentioned that he himself has two young sons, twins, who he says are very different from each other, and he believes that having AI-driven tutors or instructors will help them each get the individual approach they need. He closed his remarks by saying that he quote “hopes to provide each child with a super-power AI teacher that is the combination of Einstein and Socrates, that way it feels like she has more than 100 teachers in front of her.” To understand that level of enthusiasm for AI, it’s useful to give some quick context. For starters, the Chinese government has declared a national goal of surpassing the U.S. in AI tech by the year 2030, so there’s almost a Sputnik-like push going on right now in that country. And one China-watcher I talked to noted that China is facing a shortage of qualified teachers in many rural areas, and there’s a huge demand for high-quality language teachers and tutors throughout the country. So in that context, there’s probably more openness than in the U.S. to the idea of bringing in software robots for some of the teaching functions. But Li painted AI as not just some pale substitute, but as ultimately superior to humans when it comes to some aspects of teaching. Much of what he described was not the company’s current product, but it’s vision of where it wants to go, including a plan to create an AI-powered tutor that teaches kids to be more creative. So far the company says it runs 1,600 learning centers in more than 300 cities across China. We were curious to talk with Li further about his thoughts, so along with Betsy Corcoran, EdSurge’s co-founder and CEO, we sat down with him for an interview.