EdSurge Podcast

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.