EdSurge Podcast

Listen to the EdSurge On Air podcast? We want to hear from you! Fill out this five-minute survey, and you can enter to win a $100 Amazon gift card. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/edsurgepodcast What’s life like after quitting a tenured job as a professor to become a freelance educator, making video courses and podcasts for a living? That’s one question we had for Kevin deLaplante, who did just that when he left Iowa State University in 2015 to focus on running his Argument Ninja Podcast and teaching courses on his online Critical Thinker Academy, both aimed at bringing concepts from his scholarship to a popular audience. One area he’s exploring these days is the rise of tribalism in U.S. politics and culture, and how it’s leading to polarization that is making it hard for us to talk to each other. He’s arguing for a new kind of “tribal literacy,” so we can better understand how humans are hard-wired to be drawn to certain tribal behaviors that, in too large a dose, can lead to trouble for societies. He says that, perhaps surprisingly, he has more time now and can explore the topic more broadly than when he was a traditional scholar. He made the move during a rush of enthusiasm for so-called MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, that big-name colleges were starting to offer low-cost higher education to a wider audience. It looked like there was going to be a big realignment. But the big shiny revolution didn’t exactly happen. So we also asked deLaplante what he thinks about the broader landscape of online education that he’s part of.

Should we build robot teachers, or even robot teaching assistants? And if so, what’s the right mix of man and machine in the classroom? To get a fresh perspective on that question, this episode we take you to China, where a couple of us from EdSurge recently traveled for a reporting trip. One of the events we peeked in on was a two-day conference about artificial intelligence in education organized by a company called Squirrel AI. It’s vision felt unusually utopian. The company’s co-founder, Derek Li, said during a keynote that replacing some teaching functions with AI-powered software would supercharge the country’s education system. Speaking to a crowd of some 2,000 attendees, he said, quote, “If our children are educated by AI teachers, then their potential can be fully realized.” He mentioned that he himself has two young sons, twins, who he says are very different from each other, and he believes that having AI-driven tutors or instructors will help them each get the individual approach they need. He closed his remarks by saying that he quote “hopes to provide each child with a super-power AI teacher that is the combination of Einstein and Socrates, that way it feels like she has more than 100 teachers in front of her.” To understand that level of enthusiasm for AI, it’s useful to give some quick context. For starters, the Chinese government has declared a national goal of surpassing the U.S. in AI tech by the year 2030, so there’s almost a Sputnik-like push going on right now in that country. And one China-watcher I talked to noted that China is facing a shortage of qualified teachers in many rural areas, and there’s a huge demand for high-quality language teachers and tutors throughout the country. So in that context, there’s probably more openness than in the U.S. to the idea of bringing in software robots for some of the teaching functions. But Li painted AI as not just some pale substitute, but as ultimately superior to humans when it comes to some aspects of teaching. Much of what he described was not the company’s current product, but it’s vision of where it wants to go, including a plan to create an AI-powered tutor that teaches kids to be more creative. So far the company says it runs 1,600 learning centers in more than 300 cities across China. We were curious to talk with Li further about his thoughts, so along with Betsy Corcoran, EdSurge’s co-founder and CEO, we sat down with him for an interview.

Open educational resources hit a turning point in 2018. For the first time ever, the federal government put forward funds to support initiatives around open educational resources, and recent studies show that faculty attitudes towards using and adapting these openly-licensed learning materials are steadily improving. But, fans of OER are increasingly facing a problem. While OER started off as free online textbooks, it still costs money to produce these materials, and professors often need guidance finding which ones are high quality. So OER advocates are realizing they need to change their pitch. While cost is still a big part of the draw, people are increasingly talking about student success and pointing to the fact that when these textbooks are open and unlicensed online, that lets professors customize them and mix and match them in new ways and improve the quality of the education. This week on the EdSurge On Air podcast, we're diving into how the OER movement is changing, and we'll check in with a couple of people on the front lines of the movement to hear from them. We spoke with Nicole Allen, director of open education at Spark, and Julie Lang is the OER Coordinator for Penn State University, to hear what is happening on the frontlines of the open movement.

Author, speaker and school consultant Ana Homayoun works with teenagers on organization, time management and overall wellness. And as tech and social media have accelerated over the years, her job has increasingly involved keeping up with the ways young people use social media, and advising parents, teachers and even tech companies about what they need to know. Homayoun’s latest book is about what she’s learned over the years on this topic, and it’s called “Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World.” EdSurge sat down with her to learn more about what’s happening in this space, and how parents and educators can make sense of the digital and social media world that’s happening all around us.

Replacing VHS tapes with YouTube clips is probably not the ideal version of moving a classroom into the 21st century. While that type of digital substitution may tick the boxes of education technology frameworks like SAMR, it doesn’t always provide an opportunity for deep thinking and real-world learning. So how do teachers actually create meaningful work and allow students real agency in a 21st century classroom? EdSurge talked with Scott McLeod, associate professor of education leadership at the University of Colorado in Denver. He’s the author of “Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning,” which explores how his “four shifts” protocol can help educators test whether their practices and pedagogies support the goals of learning in the digital age.

To get to Marty Ringle’s office at Reed College, you have to climb to the top floor of the Educational Technology Center building and get buzzed past a locked door that says “This is a Secure Area.” It felt like I was making a pilgrimage to the digital equivalent of a wise old master on the top of some mountain. And in some ways that’s not too far off. You see, Marty Ringle has been working in educational technology for more than 40 years, and he’s seen it all—the birth of the PC and and their early use at colleges, the building out of the internet, which started at colleges, and the arrival of smartphones. In fact, he was personal friends with Steve Jobs, and he heard one of the early pitches for what would become the first iPod. I made the trip recently to seek out Ringle’s perspective. After all, while tech has brought plenty of changes, not all of them have been positive. Sure it’s nice to take an Uber, but there are plenty of ways that online networks have also bred division and polarization. Before Ringle studied technology, he specialized in philosophy. He’s one of those rare humanists of his generation who devoted their careers to technology and trying to design a better world. So I wanted to know what he thought of what’s happening with tech now, and what he sees as the legacy of this digital revolution he helped bring in.

Personalized learning has been an education buzzword for several years. A recent survey of by the state education technology directors association, or SETDA, put personalized learning at the top of the list of state priorities. But how do school leaders really do personalized learning? A new book offers something like a step-by-step manual. It’s called Pathways to Personalization: A Framework for School Change, written by two long-time school innovators, Cathy Sanford and by our guest today, Shawn Rubin. Rubin spent 10 years in the classroom, and he has been the Chief Education officer at the HIghlander Institute since 2011, and has led personalized learning efforts in Rhode Island schools. He designed the Highlander Institute’s “Fuse” program, which trains educators to lead personalized learning in schools and districts. His new book offers a five-step framework to help school leaders and teacher teams design and implement blended and personalized learning initiatives based on local needs and interests. EdSurge sat down with Rubin during the EdSurge Fusion conference in October, to talk about his book and what he’s learned about personalized learning.

Artificial intelligence promises to have a dramatic—and yes, disruptive—effect on education and over jobs during the next decade. And here’s a second big trend—the role of China and Chinese companies, particularly those building products or services laced with the machine learning algorithms that we call “AI.” If you wanted to get a glimpse into what these twin forces mean for the world—and for education and learning—there's perhaps no better expert than Kai-Fu Lee. Dr. Lee has done it all: He’s been an enormously influential researcher, driving forward work on AI. Originally from Taiwan, he came the US at age 11 and went on to earn degrees from Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University. He then went on to have pivotal roles at Apple, Microsoft and Google, serving as president of Google China. He started a venture capital firm in 2009 based in Beijing called Sinoventures. He’s written eight top-selling books in China and has more than 50 million followers on social media. His latest book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New world order, is almost two books in one: It tells the story of the development of artificial intelligence and why we should pay attention to this work. And he does a remarkably deft job of describing entrepreneurism in China, and giving us a peek at what he calls the “gladiator capitalism” that is giving rise to companies with billion dollar valuations and the power to change the world. It’s already hitting the best-seller charts. EdSurge caught up with Dr. Lee in California over a Saturday morning breakfast in Palo Alto. Here’s why Dr. Lee believes that AI—and particularly AI developed by Chinese companies—is fated to rock our world, and how we learn.

It’s one of the biggest buzzwords in education today: the whole child. Basically, it’s the idea that educating students is about more than what’s said in class. Factors like nutrition, home life and out-of-school relationships can all play a huge role in how kids learn—and it’s something more schools are starting to pay attention to. The theory behind whole child is one thing. How it gets put into practice is something else entirely. That’s something Jonathan Raymond had to learn on the job. Raymond is former superintendent of Sacramento City Unified and author of “Wildflowers: A School Superintendent's Challenge to America.” This week, we hear from Raymond about what teaching to the whole child looks like in action.

For Nancy Xu, childhood revolved around her studies. That meant early-morning bus rides to school, loads of after-school classes, and by high school, spending 12 hours a day on coursework. Xu grew up in northwestern China, and the reason for all that studying was a high-stakes test called the Gaokao, a nationwide college-entrance exam. In many cases, this one ultracompetitive test determines what kind of job the student will be able to pursue as an adult. For Xu, all that studying paid off. She wound up earning a slot at a prestigious university in Shanghai, where she now lives and runs an education consulting company called Cevolution. The system worked for her. But now, Xu and many others are questioning whether the style of parenting that stresses such rigorous and constant study is the best preparation for the world after college. In fact, Xu says attitudes toward education are changing in China. The phrase ‘Tiger Mothers’ has been used to refer to parents who monitor children closely with high pressure to succeed. But now, there’s a new class of parents in China who describe themselves with a softer label: Panda Moms. Xu says that means encouraging more creativity and self-exploration. EdSurge sat down with Xu during the recent Global Education Technology summit in Beijing to ask about her ethnographic research into parenthood in China, and about what Americans can learn from the Chinese education experience.