EdSurge Podcast

"I no longer think there's a huge difference between for-profit and public higher education," Tweeted George Siemens, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and a longtime observer of tech in higher education. "Sit in enough faculty meetings, meet with enough leadership, and it becomes clear that it's all about money." The argument got some pushback from others who disagreed, so we reached out to Siemens and others in the conversation to hear them out.

It's hard for students, professors or even journalists to get a glimpse of just how much data colleges collect on students these days as they go about their coursework. That didn’t stop Bryan Short, who was a student at the University of British Columbia in 2016 when he got curious to know what information the learning management system at his university had collected on him and how it was being used. And what he found—that is, once he got a hold of it—left him feeling pretty uneasy.

Artificial intelligence is changing things—or, the people who are building the algorithms and technologies behind artificial intelligence are. And one of the challenges with bias in Artificial Intelligence tends to come down to who has access to these careers in the first place, and that's the area that Tess Posner, CEO of the nonprofit AI4All, is trying to address. EdSurge sat down with Posner, who told us about how her organization works with diverse youth to introduce them to AI fields and careers.

Bernard Bull has long been a champion of experimental higher ed models. And one of his biggest inspirations throughout his career has been a tiny college in Vermont called Goddard College. And one day Bull got offered a dream job as president of Goddard. But there was one catch. As he went through the interview process, he found out the famed college is broke, and in danger of closing. We asked Bull how he hopes to turn things around.

In the last few years, terms like “whole child” and “social-emotional learning” have become buzzwords. But behind the buzzwords are programs, often led and managed by schools, that take into account all the different things a child needs to be able to learn and grow, even if those things reach outside the traditional roles of a school. EdSurge sat down with Christina Cipriano, the director of research at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a research scientist at the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine.

Hollywood comedies like last year's Life of the Party portray adult students as fish out of water in higher education. But the reality is that these students are in the majority these days, often taking online programs or new offerings designed to serve them. We talk with Marie Cini, president of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, a group working to support programs for these so-called nontraditional students, the real-life versions of the character played by Melissa McCarthy in Life of the Party.

Teaching isn’t a simple one-way exchange. Often there are lessons to be learned from the very act of teaching, whether it’s an instructor finding new ways to reach—or not reach—students, to watching students grow before your eyes to discovering what makes collaborative learning so successful. Those are some of the examples educators shared with us on this week’s podcast.

There’s a boom in the number of grad degrees and certificates being awarded these days, especially as more colleges have moved to offer degrees online. And these degrees are now offered in different shapes and sizes, and in some cases at the faction of the price of in-person degrees. To help understand this shifting landscape, EdSurge sat down with Sean Gallagher, who has written a book on the future of university credentials, and runs a center at Northeastern University that tracks this area.

The college admissions scandal, which the FBI codenamed Varsity Blues, has raised questions about the fairness and validity of the admissions process as a whole, and specifically about whether the SAT is as secure as it should be. EdSurge sat down with Jeremy Singer, president of the College Board, the group that administers the SAT, to ask how the group is responding, and what it felt like to get the call that the test had been gamed in this way.

It’s easy to think of the ways that technology can make humans feel alienated or alone. But technology has also brought people—and teachers and students—together in new ways that have inspired learning. This is the third episode of a four part series about why teachers teach called “Teachable Moments.” We'll hear directly from educators who attended the EdSurge Fusion conference last fall about the challenges they face, and what brings them joy in teaching.