Edsurge On Air

What if you could travel 20 years into the future and visit a model high school of that time? That’s the premise of a book called “Running with Robots,” whose authors paint a hopeful future, though they say it will take effort and vision to avoid pitfalls around problems like privacy and algorithmic bias.

The SAT can feel very different to different students. While it can give any college applicant stress, some low-income and minority students see it as evidence that selective colleges don't want them. Can the rise of test-optional policies lead to a new, more equitable era of college admissions? This episode, part of our Bootstraps series on who gets what opportunities in education, first ran last December.

One of the most selective college scholarship programs in the U.S. could wind down in the next few years if it doesn’t raise a substantial sum to shore up its endowment. While many scholarships were founded and funded by billionaires or governments, this one was started by a first-generation college student living firmly in the middle class. Will she find a donor to help continue the work?

You may remember the announcement one year ago today of a new private university in Texas that hoped to better promote civil discourse and viewpoint diversity—to avoid what its leaders see as a “liberal bias” on most campuses that they say leads to groupthink rather than free and open inquiry. It turns out, this fledgling university, the University of Austin, has been quietly working on raising money and finding land for the campus—and testing out its unusual model.

What if you gathered a group of high school students in New York City, gave them fancy microphones and some training, and challenged them to make an investigative podcast about the issues they cared about the most? That’s the premise of a nonprofit called The Bell, started in 2017 by two former teachers with a journalism background and a belief that one way to improve education is to elevate the voices of students.

People who happen to be good at school and college are often described as ‘smart,’ and our systems tend to reward them with cultural status and good jobs. But what if the key to expanding educational access comes down to rethinking our concept of smarts and who has them? We talk with Freddie deBoer, author of “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice.”

There are many metaphors of edtech out there, and sometimes we might not even realize the metaphor is there. After all, ‘online lecture’ is a metaphor. EdSurge talked with a professor who just put out a book on how metaphors shape our views of education technology.

An evolutionary biologist who studies the physiology of aging has some surprising advice about brain health. And it has implications for schools and colleges—and anyone interested in learning.

What should the college career center look like in this moment of seismic shifts in the job market and the economy, and growing skepticism of whether going to college pays off? We talked with two professors who edited the new book “Mapping the Future of Undergraduate Career Education.”

Longtime professor Cathy Davidson is on a mission these days to promote the practice of active learning. And she says the stakes are higher than people might realize. It’s not just about test scores and whether people learn. She thinks there’s an ethical issue that sometimes gets lost in discussions about teaching.

There's a big difference between being nearly done with college and getting that diploma. In the finale of our Second Acts podcast series, we learn whether the three students we’ve been following finished their degrees, and what the distinction of college grad means to them at this point in their lives.

It’s back-to-school season, but not every teacher opted to return. This week, we listen in on a frank conversation between Jennifer Yoo-Brannon, an instructional coach in California, and Diana Bell, a veteran teacher of more than 18 years who recently decided to leave the profession.

Some big state universities have decided to get into online learning with a big splash, by buying an existing online college that already serves thousands of online students. What does it say about the future of online education, both at colleges and schools?

Millions of U.S. adults have attended some college but never finished a degree. What does it take to get them back in class? And once they’re back, how can colleges help them stay on track? In the second episode of our podcast series Second Acts, we hear the in-depth stories of three students who returned to finish a degree.

It’s easier than you might think to pay someone to write a term paper for you. A former homework-for-hire writer, Dave Tomar, shares the details of this booming industry in a new book, “The Complete Guide to Contract Cheating in Higher Education.” What does the popularity of these services say about our education system? And what can be done?

Taryn Southern is a pioneering YouTuber who these days experiments with how cutting edge tech might transform human expression. She’s recorded a pop album that she co-wrote with some AI code, for instance, and she’s created a digital clone of herself that she can use to make videos for her popular YouTube channel. Here's what she sees coming for education.

As an instructional coach, Jennifer Yoo-Brannon’s conversations with educators have gotten increasingly difficult this year. Rather than coping, she argues that her hope for every educator is to find a community of resistance when they need it. She says what education really needs is for teachers to flock together, affirm each other’s experiences and resist together.

Bad experiences and feelings of disengagement in middle and high school can haunt students even as they enter college. That, plus a number of other factors, explain why millions of students have left college without a degree. In the first episode of a new podcast series we’re calling Second Acts, we hear the in-depth stories of three students who walked away from post-secondary education and are now back to finish a degree.

What if schools and colleges ditched letter grades and GPAs? That’s the key question in this episode of our Bootstraps podcast series about who gets what opportunities in American education. It first ran last fall and was out most popular episode of the past year.

Three educators who were part of EdSurge's first Voices of Change Writing Fellowship share how personal, narrative essay writing can help learners and leaders reshape our world.