Edsurge On Air

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.

It's hard to generalize about which is “better” for learning — online or in person. Because both clearly have their pros and cons, at least listening to students at one campus adjusting to life back to in-person classes.

EdSurge has spent the last month auctioning off our first NFT, a digital token on the blockchain, to learn what the process involves and the issues the technology raises. On this week's episode, we share what happened.

Big changes are coming to higher education, and those changes will be bigger and more disruptive than many college leaders and experts realize as online learning grows. That’s the view of longtime education leader Arthur Levine, in a new book called The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future. And that means it's time to think differentLY about equity.

To fit all the billions of neurons in the human brain into our heads, they're organized so that brain regions are carefully mapped to things like vision and hearing. And understanding those maps can be a key to better understanding how the mind—and how learning—works, according to Rebecca Schwarzlose, a postdoctoral neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and author of the new book, "Brainscapes."

Online high schools were growing even before the pandemic struck, and some online schools were beginning to have a global reach. Now that the whole world has been forced to experiment more with online delivery, where does that leave the international market for online education at the K-12 level? And what about undergrad?

This week we're hearing stories from the “educational underground"—the experimental programs and “hidden credentials” people get that aren’t on the traditional straight line of college. It's a conversation with Peter Smith, who has advocated for new models of adult learning for more than 50 years, as a college president and later a U.S. Congressman.

There’s all this buzz about NFTs these days, with artists using the blockchain-based format to sell digital works that are getting snapped up by collectors for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some students and educators are experimenting with the tech too, and some say they could make a big splash.

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.

Freeman Hrabowski is a college president who has long fought for civil rights and racial justice. When he was 12 years old he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama—and got arrested. His program to help students major and persist in STEM fields hsa been shown to work, and several colleges are trying to replicate it.

Learning science is always advancing, yielding new insights about how people gain and retain knowledge and skills. How can classroom teachers keep up—and even conduct their very own research to improve their instruction, day-by-day and week-by-week?

Little kids are curious about race and difference. So how are teachers preparing to help children develop positive social identities, encourage their self-expression and help them feel comfortable and safe? We talk with Dr. Calvin Moore, Jr., CEO of the Council for Professional Recognition, which administers the Child Development Associate National Credentialing Program, the most widely-used credential in early childhood education.

Just after the pandemic began, we reached out to one of the masters of making educational videos, John Green, for his advice and thoughts on education during this unprecedented time. And he talks about his podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, now a bestselling book by the same name.

Teachers around the country have been giving an unusual assignment to their students that goes like this: Think of someone who is in a bit of a financial pinch, make a video about why the person deserves a boost, and then hand-deliver the person a check for $1,000. The money comes from a philanthropic effort called VING, and on this week’s podcast we talk to its founder and hear one of these surprise student gifts in action.

We’re living in a world of big data, but also one where misinformation spreads like never before. On this week's podcast we talk with Tim Harford, author of The Data Detective, about his advice for how to better understand the numbers in our world.

People don’t talk much today about early teaching machines, some of which were made out of wood and brass. And that’s no accident, according to Audrey Watters, a longtime critical observer of edtech who is out with a new book called Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning. On this episode, we’re dusting off these old teaching machines from all the way back to the 1920s, to see what these low-tech devices can teach us about education today.

Only two percent of teachers in the U.S. are black men. Markus Flynn, executive director of the nonprofit Black Men Teach, is leading creative efforts to diversify the teaching workforce, and change the culture of schools.

Today, one in five college students is a parent. Yet few higher ed institutions track parenting status or have programs designed to serve students who have children. For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we spoke with author Nicole Lynn Lewis about what teen parents need to thrive at college.

What a debate about the admissions process at one of the best public high schools in the country says about who should get what in education.