EdSurge Podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

To fit all the billions of neurons in the human brain into our heads, they're organized so that brain regions are carefully mapped to things like vision and hearing. And understanding those maps can be a key to better understanding how the mind—and how learning—works, according to Rebecca Schwarzlose, a postdoctoral neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and author of the new book, "Brainscapes."

Online high schools were growing even before the pandemic struck, and some online schools were beginning to have a global reach. Now that the whole world has been forced to experiment more with online delivery, where does that leave the international market for online education at the K-12 level? And what about undergrad?