Edsurge On Air

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

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 t

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 say

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