EdSurge Podcast

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?

This week we're hearing stories from the “educational underground"—the experimental programs and “hidden credentials” people get that aren’t on the traditional straight line of college. It's a conversation with Peter Smith, who has advocated for new models of adult learning for more than 50 years, as a college president and later a U.S. Congressman.

There’s all this buzz about NFTs these days, with artists using the blockchain-based format to sell digital works that are getting snapped up by collectors for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some students and educators are experimenting with the tech too, and some say they could make a big splash.

Sometime early in elementary school, kids are put on one of two paths: regular or gifted. Where did this idea come from? The answer goes back more than a 100 years, to a once-famous scholar named Lewis Terman. And it turns out his legacy, and the future of gifted programs, are still very much under debate.