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EdSurge Podcast

Latest episodes

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Nov 9, 2021 • 30min

What If Free Online Courses Weren’t Inside Walled Gardens?

Free online courses have become big business in recent years, offered by companies that work to upsell learners to paid products. But that's not how they started out. Stephen Downes, a pioneer of open online education, argues for eliminating things like free registration to get to free course materials, to better spread the ideas.
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Nov 2, 2021 • 28min

Breaking Down the Early Childhood Education Crisis — and What Might Be Done About It

You’re probably hearing a lot about the crisis in early childhood education these days, as Congress is on the cusp the biggest policy change — and investment — in early childhood in decades. On today’s podcast, we want to step back and look at how we got here -- at what the situation means to educators at all levels and for parents, and at what the Biden Administration’s proposals could mean.
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Oct 26, 2021 • 38min

Are Upstart Online Providers Getting Better at Teaching Than Traditional Colleges?

You may remember the hype about 10 years ago when a new approach to online teaching with technology was touted as a possible alternative to traditional college, called MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, led by startups like Coursera. These days you don’t hear much about them, but they never went away—in fact they’ve boomed since the pandemic. So much so that one professor thinks that higher ed should probably be nervous—or at least that colleges should try to learn something from these well-funded efforts.
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Oct 19, 2021 • 28min

Encouraging Teachers To Share Their Mistakes

We all make mistakes. But for educators, mistakes can be particularly challenging, since there’s a culture in education that prizes showing teachers at their best, and glossing over some of the biggest challenges. One educator has set out to change that, with a podcast that asks teachers to share their biggest mistake and how they've learned from it.
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Oct 12, 2021 • 39min

The Tyranny of Letter Grades. Bootstraps, Ep. 4

Our current grading system can be a way for kids to prove themselves and win college scholarships, or admission to selective colleges. It can also be a barrier, in sometimes surprising ways. What might a world without letter grades and GPAs look like?
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Oct 5, 2021 • 41min

Should Robots Replace Teachers?

Robots are having a moment—including the announcement last week of a new home robot by Amazon. What could that mean for education? We talked with Neil Selwyn, a research professor at Monash University in Australia and author of the provocative book "Should Robots Replace Teachers?"
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Sep 28, 2021 • 28min

This Educator Tutored Chinese Students Remotely From Her Basement. Then It All Came Crashing Down.

Meet a U.S. educator who has been tutoring students in China for years from her basement closet, only to have a policy change cut her off from her students. On this week's episode, we dig into a drama playing out in the online tutoring market half a world away, and look at how it's having huge repercussions for many educators in the U.S.
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Sep 21, 2021 • 26min

Going Back: What College Teaching Is Like Compared to Last Year

It's hard to generalize about which is “better” for learning — online or in person. Because both clearly have their pros and cons, at least listening to students at one campus adjusting to life back to in-person classes.
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Sep 14, 2021 • 39min

Glitches, ‘Gas Fees’ and Lessons We Learned Selling an NFT

EdSurge has spent the last month auctioning off our first NFT, a digital token on the blockchain, to learn what the process involves and the issues the technology raises. On this week's episode, we share what happened.
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Sep 7, 2021 • 23min

Why The Coming ‘Upheaval’ in Higher Ed May Change Notions of Equity, and Prestige

Big changes are coming to higher education, and those changes will be bigger and more disruptive than many college leaders and experts realize as online learning grows. That’s the view of longtime education leader Arthur Levine, in a new book called The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future. And that means it's time to think differentLY about equity.

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