EdSurge Podcast
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Social studies has been ‘deprioritized’ for decades, in favor of STEM fields, according to some educators. Could AI essay grading help improve the quality of civics and social studies education in schools?
There are key junctures in education that are especially important for helping students feel they belong in school or college. And new research points to better ways to strengthen student-teacher relationships and a sense of belonging, argues Greg Walton, a psychology professor at Stanford University.
There’s growing skepticism of higher education, complete with popular memes on social media that “college is a scam.” Experts in policy and marketing have some suggestions on how to counter that narrative.
A longtime educator worries that the raging culture wars in education create toxic environments that hurt academic learning. He’s started a podcast that brings together people with deeply different views on issues that are most dividing school communities these days and uses depolarizing techniques to try to model repairing such breaches.
Could virtual reality be the key to teaching indigenous ways of knowing to a broad population of students? Jared Ten Brink, a doctoral student in education, is trying to record and teach some key practices of his tribal elders using VR video.
In part two of our podcast series Doubting College, which explores the growing skepticism of higher ed, we talk to students and counselors at a public high school about how students are thinking through their choices after graduation.
A recent study ranked the top professions that are likely to be disrupted by ChatGPT and other new AI technologies, and most of them require college degrees. How does higher ed need to change what it teaches to respond?
Did the education theories that drive today’s schools and teaching practices get off track and do they need a reset — one that gets back to earlier days of oral storytelling? That was the argument of philosopher Kieran Egan, whose educational writings have recently gotten attention.
It can be harder than ever for teachers to manage their relationships with parents, even though digital tools make interactions more frequent. This week’s EdSurge podcast looks at why.
There’s a growing push to add AI literacy as a subject in schools and colleges. But what exactly is AI literacy, and can educators promote curiosity about the subject amid their own concerns, and in some cases fear, around ChatGPT and other generative AI?
Holding student attention may be harder than ever. Even if educators make students put away their smartphones, internet-connected devices have changed the way people relate to others and made it harder for people to be present, argues a Georgetown University professor.
Experts have described this as a 'golden age' of discovery in the area of learning science, with new insights emerging regularly on how humans learn. So what can educators, policymakers and any lifelong learner gain from these new insights? This is a rebroadcast of one of our most popular episodes of 2023.
What were the biggest surprises and trends in education in 2023? Hear from five EdSurge reporters as they give their highlights and analysis and also talk about what they’re digging into in the coming year.
“Why do some schools get better quickly, and others get stuck?” That question drove MIT professor of digital media Justin Reich to write a new book about what he’s learned as a teacher, edtech consultant and professor about making small regular improvements. This episode originally ran this summer.
Paul LeBlanc grew Southern New Hampshire University to an online education powerhouse with more than 200,000 students. This month he announced that he’ll step down as president after the academic year, and he talks to EdSurge about online education, about how he responds to critics who worry that the university has borrowed too much from for-profit universities, and about why his next project involves rethinking teaching with AI.
When the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel started a fellowship 13 years ago that pays young people $100,000 each to not go to college for two years, it made a splash and drew criticism. These days that sort of skepticism of college is far more mainstream. We dive into the history and impact of the program on the first episode of our new podcast series about changing public views of higher ed, called Doubting College.
Students these days are under constant watch with digital tools — whether it’s friends posting pictures on social media, or learning management systems sending parents alerts about missed assignments. And that can make it hard for students to learn to solve their own problems, argues Devorah Heitner, an author who advises schools on social media issues.
Schools of education are working harder at recruiting these days, in response to enrollment declines. Can more people — and more people from a variety of backgrounds — be convinced to join the teaching profession in this particularly trying time?
It’s important to nurture philosophical thinking in kids throughout school and college. So argues a philosophy professor who wrote a book that highlights the natural tendencies of kids to think like philosophers. When big, important questions arise, he says, parents and educators should treat kids like conversational equals. This is a rerun of an episode that first ran in June.
The rise of generative AI technology such as ChatGPT could rapidly reshape knowledge work in the next few years. A trio of education researchers recently sat down to map out what those changes could mean for education — and what steps should be taken to bring out the best of the tech while avoiding pitfalls.
When a professor’s research showed that standard methods of teaching problem-solving weren’t working, he set out to figure out what led to more student thinking. His resulting approach is spreading through classrooms, helped by teachers sharing examples on social media.
More educators are wondering whether the grading system hinders many students rather than helps them learn. For this week’s podcast, we’re rebroadcasting an episode from this summer diving into alternative methods of marking papers in ways that encourage students to continually revise their work rather than quibble over which letter grade they deserve.
It’s statistically harder to get into a selective college these days, and who gets in and why can feel like a mystery. So students are turning to TikTok and other social media platforms to fill the void, in what some admissions folks call a “toxic” trend. We talked to a TikToker and an admissions counselor on how to help.
Since winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 2001, Carl Wieman has devoted the bulk of his energies to trying to improve teaching. That has led him to promote active learning – and to look for better ways to evaluate teaching. Will they catch on?
Students these days are terrible at sorting facts from misinformation online and on social media. But they can improve with just a few simple strategies, argues information literacy researcher Mike Caulfield. And he says those skills are even more important with the emergence of ChatGPT.
Can educators continue to teach troubling but worthwhile texts in this time of polarization and culture wars? And how can instructors make classrooms a welcoming place for debate as schools and colleges grow more diverse? This week’s EdSurge Podcast dives into the thorny issue of encouraging viewpoint diversity in classrooms.
What if Rodin’s famous sculpture of the thinking man sitting holding his chin gives us the wrong idea about how people think? A growing body of research suggests that thinking is influenced not just by what’s inside our skull, but by cues from our body movements, by our surroundings, and by other people we’re interacting with. And that has implications for educators.
Could cutting-edge virtual reality tech help to spread classical education models and alternatives to traditional public schools? That’s what one proponent is hoping, and she’s started a new online charter school delivered largely through VR headsets to try it.
A mockumentary web series made by undergraduates makes some timely observations about college admissions, and about student life after the pandemic — when students sometimes struggle to make social connections after high school experiences spent on lockdown.
The pandemic has sparked more-nuanced conversations about kids and tech, getting away from simple questions of how much screen time to allow. Now, one researcher argues, it’s time to provide better guidance on how to match tech to what children need, and can reasonably handle, at each stage of their development.
