This Week with EdSurge

EdSurge Podcast

This Week with EdSurge is the essential weekly podcast that takes you past the headlines and deep into the fascinating, fast-evolving world of education. Hosted by Ira Apfel alongside our talented team of EdSurge contributors, each episode cuts through the hype to explore the human stories shaping our schools—from the rise of artificial intelligence in the classroom to student well-being, shifting policies, and the future of teaching. Whether you are a classroom educator, a district leader, an edtech innovator, or simply a curious mind, this show delivers the rigorous, empathetic, and trusted journalism you need to understand where education is headed.

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494 episodes
Updated Wednesday

Episodes494

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Feb 26, 2019 · 33 min
Much Ado About MOOCs: Where Are We in the Evolution of Online Courses?
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.
Feb 19, 2019 · 18 min
The Science of Empathy: What Researchers Want Teachers to Know
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.”
Feb 12, 2019 · 22 min
Can Online Education Lower Costs and Improve Quality?
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.
Feb 5, 2019 · 30 min
Is Teaching an Art or a Science? New Book Takes a Fresh Look at ‘How Humans Learn.’
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.
Jan 29, 2019 · 37 min
The Professor Who Quit His Tenured Job to Make Podcasts and Lecture Videos
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.
Jan 23, 2019 · 11 min
How Much Artificial Intelligence Should There Be in the Classroom?
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.
Jan 15, 2019 · 16 min
As OER Grows Up, Advocates Stress More Than Just Low Cost
Open educational resources hit a turning point in 2018. For the first time ever, the federal government put forward funds to support initiatives around open educational resources, and recent studies show that faculty attitudes towards using and adapting these openly-licensed learning materials are steadily improving. But, fans of OER are increasingly facing a problem. While OER started off as free online textbooks, it still costs money to produce these materials, and professors often need guidance finding which ones are high quality. So OER advocates are realizing they need to change their pitch. While cost is still a big part of the draw, people are increasingly talking about student success and pointing to the fact that when these textbooks are open and unlicensed online, that lets professors customize them and mix and match them in new ways and improve the quality of the education. This week on the EdSurge On Air podcast, we're diving into how the OER movement is changing, and we'll check in with a couple of people on the front lines of the movement to hear from them. We spoke with Nicole Allen, director of open education at Spark, and Julie Lang is the OER Coordinator for Penn State University, to hear what is happening on the frontlines of the open movement.
Jan 8, 2019 · 27 min
How To Keep Kids From Being Mean Online
Author, speaker and school consultant Ana Homayoun works with teenagers on organization, time management and overall wellness. And as tech and social media have accelerated over the years, her job has increasingly involved keeping up with the ways young people use social media, and advising parents, teachers and even tech companies about what they need to know. Homayoun’s latest book is about what she’s learned over the years on this topic, and it’s called “Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World.” EdSurge sat down with her to learn more about what’s happening in this space, and how parents and educators can make sense of the digital and social media world that’s happening all around us.
Jan 1, 2019 · 12 min
How to Move From Digital Substitution to ‘Deeper Learning’
Replacing VHS tapes with YouTube clips is probably not the ideal version of moving a classroom into the 21st century. While that type of digital substitution may tick the boxes of education technology frameworks like SAMR, it doesn’t always provide an opportunity for deep thinking and real-world learning. So how do teachers actually create meaningful work and allow students real agency in a 21st century classroom? EdSurge talked with Scott McLeod, associate professor of education leadership at the University of Colorado in Denver. He’s the author of “Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning,” which explores how his “four shifts” protocol can help educators test whether their practices and pedagogies support the goals of learning in the digital age.
Dec 27, 2018 · 35 min
This Administrator Helped Shape Tech at Colleges For More Than 40 Years. Here’s His Outlook.
To get to Marty Ringle’s office at Reed College, you have to climb to the top floor of the Educational Technology Center building and get buzzed past a locked door that says “This is a Secure Area.” It felt like I was making a pilgrimage to the digital equivalent of a wise old master on the top of some mountain. And in some ways that’s not too far off. You see, Marty Ringle has been working in educational technology for more than 40 years, and he’s seen it all—the birth of the PC and and their early use at colleges, the building out of the internet, which started at colleges, and the arrival of smartphones. In fact, he was personal friends with Steve Jobs, and he heard one of the early pitches for what would become the first iPod. I made the trip recently to seek out Ringle’s perspective. After all, while tech has brought plenty of changes, not all of them have been positive. Sure it’s nice to take an Uber, but there are plenty of ways that online networks have also bred division and polarization. Before Ringle studied technology, he specialized in philosophy. He’s one of those rare humanists of his generation who devoted their careers to technology and trying to design a better world. So I wanted to know what he thought of what’s happening with tech now, and what he sees as the legacy of this digital revolution he helped bring in.
Dec 18, 2018 · 21 min
How Can School Leaders Personalize Learning? New Book Offers a Guide.
Personalized learning has been an education buzzword for several years. A recent survey of by the state education technology directors association, or SETDA, put personalized learning at the top of the list of state priorities. But how do school leaders really do personalized learning? A new book offers something like a step-by-step manual. It’s called Pathways to Personalization: A Framework for School Change, written by two long-time school innovators, Cathy Sanford and by our guest today, Shawn Rubin. Rubin spent 10 years in the classroom, and he has been the Chief Education officer at the HIghlander Institute since 2011, and has led personalized learning efforts in Rhode Island schools. He designed the Highlander Institute’s “Fuse” program, which trains educators to lead personalized learning in schools and districts. His new book offers a five-step framework to help school leaders and teacher teams design and implement blended and personalized learning initiatives based on local needs and interests. EdSurge sat down with Rubin during the EdSurge Fusion conference in October, to talk about his book and what he’s learned about personalized learning.
Dec 11, 2018 · 43 min
How This Famed Chinese Venture Capitalist Thinks AI Will Reshape Teaching
Artificial intelligence promises to have a dramatic—and yes, disruptive—effect on education and over jobs during the next decade. And here’s a second big trend—the role of China and Chinese companies, particularly those building products or services laced with the machine learning algorithms that we call “AI.” If you wanted to get a glimpse into what these twin forces mean for the world—and for education and learning—there's perhaps no better expert than Kai-Fu Lee. Dr. Lee has done it all: He’s been an enormously influential researcher, driving forward work on AI. Originally from Taiwan, he came the US at age 11 and went on to earn degrees from Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University. He then went on to have pivotal roles at Apple, Microsoft and Google, serving as president of Google China. He started a venture capital firm in 2009 based in Beijing called Sinoventures. He’s written eight top-selling books in China and has more than 50 million followers on social media. His latest book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New world order, is almost two books in one: It tells the story of the development of artificial intelligence and why we should pay attention to this work. And he does a remarkably deft job of describing entrepreneurism in China, and giving us a peek at what he calls the “gladiator capitalism” that is giving rise to companies with billion dollar valuations and the power to change the world. It’s already hitting the best-seller charts. EdSurge caught up with Dr. Lee in California over a Saturday morning breakfast in Palo Alto. Here’s why Dr. Lee believes that AI—and particularly AI developed by Chinese companies—is fated to rock our world, and how we learn.
Dec 4, 2018 · 19 min
What Teaching to the Whole Child Looks Like in Action
It’s one of the biggest buzzwords in education today: the whole child. Basically, it’s the idea that educating students is about more than what’s said in class. Factors like nutrition, home life and out-of-school relationships can all play a huge role in how kids learn—and it’s something more schools are starting to pay attention to. The theory behind whole child is one thing. How it gets put into practice is something else entirely. That’s something Jonathan Raymond had to learn on the job. Raymond is former superintendent of Sacramento City Unified and author of “Wildflowers: A School Superintendent's Challenge to America.” This week, we hear from Raymond about what teaching to the whole child looks like in action.
Nov 28, 2018 · 28 min
In China, a Generation Raised by 'Tiger Mothers' Seeks a Softer Approach
For Nancy Xu, childhood revolved around her studies. That meant early-morning bus rides to school, loads of after-school classes, and by high school, spending 12 hours a day on coursework. Xu grew up in northwestern China, and the reason for all that studying was a high-stakes test called the Gaokao, a nationwide college-entrance exam. In many cases, this one ultracompetitive test determines what kind of job the student will be able to pursue as an adult. For Xu, all that studying paid off. She wound up earning a slot at a prestigious university in Shanghai, where she now lives and runs an education consulting company called Cevolution. The system worked for her. But now, Xu and many others are questioning whether the style of parenting that stresses such rigorous and constant study is the best preparation for the world after college. In fact, Xu says attitudes toward education are changing in China. The phrase ‘Tiger Mothers’ has been used to refer to parents who monitor children closely with high pressure to succeed. But now, there’s a new class of parents in China who describe themselves with a softer label: Panda Moms. Xu says that means encouraging more creativity and self-exploration. EdSurge sat down with Xu during the recent Global Education Technology summit in Beijing to ask about her ethnographic research into parenthood in China, and about what Americans can learn from the Chinese education experience.
Nov 20, 2018 · 26 min
New Book Looks for 'Timeless' Approach to Rethinking Schools
The key to reforming schools is imagination. Think bringing the spirit of shows like The Jetsons or Star Trek to school design, throwing out all preconceptions and imagining what a new kind of school could be like designed for today’s needs. That’s the argument made in a new book, Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Are Changing Schools. EdSurge’s CEO and co-founder, Betsy Corcoran, recently sat down with two of the book’s co-authors, Pam Moran, and Ira Socal, to better understand their argument, and ask what practical advice they have for teachers and administrators looking to transform schools.
Nov 14, 2018 · 27 min
Rethinking the First Two Years of Higher Education
The first two years of college are often treated like something you just have to get through—and almost like a commodity. Even the term “general education,” as the curriculum is called at that point, feels, well, generic. Jennifer Schubert wants to rethink the first two years. She’s come up with a new model of a two-year college that puts less of an emphasis on academic disciplines and more on they kinds of skills students will need whether they continue their studies or go straight into the job market. She calls it Alder College, though so far it’s just an idea, as its still in the planning phase. Schubert speaks the language of both higher education and business. She’s been a professor at a traditional college, as well as a consultant and business strategist. But these days she’s getting schooled in just how hard it is to start a college from scratch. EdSurge sat down with Schubert recently to talk about her idea, and about her struggle to get her college off the ground.
Nov 6, 2018 · 9 min
Has ‘Shift’ Happened? Revisiting a Viral Video From 2008
About 10 years ago, a short video called Shift Happens went viral, providing a wake-up call to educators that their students would enter a very different world once they left the classroom and entered the workforce. The video presented a series of surprising statistics set to music. More than a quarter of a million people have watched the eight-and-a-half-minute video, and one of the video’s creators estimates millions more have viewed four follow-up videos. It marked a bit of a cultural moment. So we decided it would be interesting to follow up with one of those creators, Scott McLeod, to ask what he would change about the video today, and what he would include if he released a new version based on where we are in 2018. McLeod, an associate professor of education leadership at the University of Colorado in Denver, said things haven’t gone exactly as he hoped when releasing that video ten years ago.
Oct 30, 2018 · 23 min
Is Open Content Enough? Where OER Advocates Say the Movement Must Go Next
Open educational resources have been around for more than a decade, and the sheer number of these materials—in the form of textbooks, courses, videos, software and other public-domain resources—are increasingly available online. . But as more open materials become accessible, advocates for open education still see room for improvement. This week on the EdSurge On Air podcast, we hear from Jess Mitchell, a senior manager of research and design at the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University, and Kent McGuire, director of the Education Program at William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who both keynoted the OpenEd conference in New York earlier this month and shared ideas on where the open movement is headed.
Oct 23, 2018 · 16 min
How Do You Prepare Students for Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet?
There is a lot of talk these days about robots replacing humans in the workforce, but those conversations remain largely abstract. For students in school today, however, the issue is urgent, research shows. What if the job they aspire to today is no longer an option when it comes time to graduate? How can they train for jobs that don’t even exist yet? On the other side of that equation are educators, who often draw from their own learning experiences in K-12 and higher education to inform their instruction. What responsibility do they have in preparing today’s students for a future none of them can really envision? EdSurge recently sat down with Karen Cator, the CEO of Digital Promise, to get her take. Cator is a former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology who has been championing digital learning since long before the term “digital learning” was being thrown around—back when she was still a classroom teacher in Alaska. Of all the issues and trends in edtech these days, she says automation is one of the most pressing—and one that all educators should be thinking about.
Oct 16, 2018 · 22 min
How to Bring Innovation to Campus Without Cheapening Education
Do you want fries with that education? That question is one that many professors fear is essentially coming to colleges, as higher-ed leaders adopt practices from businesses in an attempt to rethink their operations. There’s even a growing body of scholarly work that outlines a critique against the corporatization of college—arguing that even when reforms are well-intentioned, they are making campuses more like burger franchises than centers of learning and research. So how can colleges try new teaching practices, or data-driven experiments, or other new approaches without sacrificing their core values? That was the topic of our latest installment of EdSurge Live, an online town hall about big issues facing edtech. For this week’s podcast, we’re bringing you highlights of that discussion, which took place a couple of weeks ago. As you’ll hear we invited one of those skeptical scholars, as well as an innovation leader from a college.