Edsurge On Air

Many professors are expressing frustration and even “terror” over ChatGPT, the latest AI tool that students may be using to write their papers for them. That has academic honor committees scrambling to revise policies and provide resources to instructors.

Schools are finding better ways to teach recent immigrant and refugee students. A new book by a high school history and civics teacher collects innovative strategies, and argues that getting the issue right is crucial for building a strong democracy.

Professors are finding that they can’t just go back to teaching as they did before the pandemic and expect the same result. It takes more these days to hold student attention, and convince them to show up. Check out part two of our series reported from the back of large lecture classes to see how teaching is changing.

A new AI chatbot can spit out long-form answers to just about any question, in a way that sounds eerily human. Students are already figuring out they can use it to write their essays, and educators are pondering how to adapt.

Is a college degree necessary these days? One father and son exemplify a generational difference when it comes to that question. Both dropped out of college in their 20s. Now dad is back in an online program, trying to finish. The son recently stopped college and isn’t sure if he’ll ever return. Listen to their debate at the end of this reissued episode of our Second Acts series on returning adult college students.

EdSurge visited large lecture classes to get a sense of what college feels like now that COVID is more under control after years of pandemic disruptions. Students and professors say that years of remote instruction—often referred to as ‘Zoom University’—has left many students more likely to get distracted by their devices, or to place less value on class, thinking they can get whatever is happening in classrooms on their own.

These days many teachers are documenting their lives on podcasts, Instagram or other social media. It all adds up to a kind of virtual teacher’s lounge. But as EdSurge Voices of Change writing fellow Patrick Harris II found out, sharing raw details of your teaching life online can bring big challenges, as well as unusual opportunities.

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?