Edsurge On Air

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 cou

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.

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.

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 R

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 interest

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 Superp

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.

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 press

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Imagine you’re an elementary school student. Your teacher has told your class to watch several streaming videos for a class project. You might want to watch some of the videos at home, but your family doesn’t have high-speed internet. That’s just one way technology in education can fail to serve some students. Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine who studies how young people use technology, says it’s not necessarily because the teachers or the people making edtech tools have bad intentions. She argues that understanding another person’s situation is tough if you don’t share that experience. EdSurge recently sat down with Ito at the Intentional Play Summit to get her thoughts on equity in edtech, creativity and how kids’ relationship to technology has changed over the years.

Technology shapes the way we interact everyday. We FaceTime with family across the country, we send snaps to our friends to let them know where we are and what we're doing. But sometimes we fail to realize that the platforms and data that push us to interact, they don't always do it in objective ways. Our interactions are increasingly shaped by algorithms, and those codes are designed by some human. Those programmers literally write the script for the ways that tech will make us tick, for better or for worse. The practice of intentionally guiding user behavior is known as 'persuasive technology,' and it’s making its way into our phones, our homes, and our schools. This week on the EdSurge On Air podcast, we talk with three experts who study persuasive tech, behavior design, and the ways that algorithms behind technology and search engines can leave damaging effects on society and further exacerbate social inequalities.

Entrepreneur Steve Blank has served as a founder, investor and even in the air force. But there’s another title he’s is known for: professor. Blank has earned a reputation among budding and veteran business leaders alike as the father of the Lean Startup movement, a business philosophy that popularized startup concepts like “pivoting” and “minimum viable product.” And he’s taught these ideas on business and innovation at Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia and New York Universities. His course on the “lean” methodologies, called Lean Launchpad, is offered at more than 75 schools around the world and was one of the earliest to appear on the online course platform Udacity. This week on the EdSurge On Air podcast, we talk to Steve about both his business and teaching careers, and how changes in the startup world are reflected in both the lean method and his courses. Listen below, or subscribe to the EdSurge On Air podcast on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher). Highli

John McPhee, a master of telling nonfiction stories, became a teacher by accident 43 years ago when Princeton University needed a last-minute replacement. He has steered the course ever since, each spring when he takes breaks from writing books or pieces for The New Yorker, and it has become legendary in journalism circles. The list of his alumni include some of today’s most well-known writers: David Remnick (now editor of The New Yorker), Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation), Tim Ferriss (author of the bestselling “4-Hour Workweek”), and so on. McPhee lays out his course in his latest book, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, and I was eager to talk to him about his craftsmanship as a teacher. To my surprise, though, he downplayed his impact in the classroom, and even suggested that you can’t really teach the kind of writing that he, in fact, teaches.

Online education has been touted as a way to increase access to education. But it’s increasingly unclear if online learning is living up to its promise for students, even as digital learning makes its way into more institutions’ offerings. The quality of online courses still varies drastically, and research shows there are major racial disparities in digital-learning outcomes. This has all left us asking: Who does online education really serve? To help answer that question, we recently brought two online learning experts to EdSurge Live, a monthly video-based town hall event, to talk about their work and research in online education, and what’s needed to better serve students in the digital space. Our guests were Michelle Pacansky-Brock, faculty mentor for the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative and @ONE (Online Network of Educators), and Di Xu an assistant professor at UC Irvine School of Education.

Some of the earliest and largest coding bootcamp programs shut their doors for good last year. And it left many people wondering if these short term tech training programs are actually worth the investment (for investors and students alike). One person who’s remained optimistic about the shake ups in the industry is Ruben Harris. Harris is a CEO of Career Karma, which aims to help prospective students navigate the bootcamp market, and he also hosts his own podcast about breaking into the tech industry, called Breaking into Startups. We spoke to Harris recently about how his company is trying to shift the demographics of the coding bootcamp industry and what that looks like.