EdSurge Podcast

Khan Academy has grown from a grassroots phenomenon on YouTube to a non-profit with a mission to change education. Its big idea is to promote a notion of mastery learning, where students don't move on until they understand each step through a curriculum. We asked Sal Khan how that broader goal of making mastery learning mainstream is going, and what's next for Khan Academy.

Could the pandemic be a moment that competency-based education catches on more widely. It's an approach where colleges award degrees based on what students can show they know, rather than how long they've spent in a classroom. Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, talks about his new book about the approach, called Students First: Equity, Access and Opportunity in Higher Education.

Scientists agree that climate change is real and extremely pressing. But many kids in the U.S. aren’t so sure—even ones who have experienced its effects firsthand. The problem may be what’s taught (or isn’t taught) in today’s schools. Climate author Katie Worth takes us through her new book “Miseducation,” and what successful schools are doing to combat misinformation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?"

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.