This Week with EdSurge

College kids have a reputation for seeking out free food, and that's why any student organizer knows that ordering pizza is a good way to lure folks to a meeting. But for many students, hunger is a more serious problem. Many campus leaders are trying new ways to address the problem of 'food insecurity' on campus—which can impact professors as well as students.

Back in 2005, one of the biggest stories in tech was a push by a group of MIT professors to build a $100 laptop and give them to children in schools around the world. It was presented as a feel-good story that no one could object to. The story of how these laptops grew into a cultural phenomenon, what their educational impact was, and of what happened to them after they faded from public discussio...

Computing experts love speed races, and there’s an ongoing battle to build the fastest computer on earth. Usually the overall trend follows what’s known as Moore’s Law, with the speed of the fastest computer doubling every 14 months or so. But last week saw the announcement of a new kind of speed record. A team of scientists from Google said they used a quantum computer to solve a problem in less...

In 1995, NASA astronaut Dr. Bernard Harris became the first African American to perform a spacewalk, and he has spent more than 18 days in space. Today, he's the CEO of NMSI, the National Math and Science Initiative, which runs programs designed to boost the number of STEM teachers. We talked with Dr. Harris about his mission to bring in culturally responsive teaching in STEM, and we asked what it...

Researchers are making new discoveries these days about how people learn, and some of those findings are making their way onto campus, in the form of new teaching practices. That has Matthew Rascoff, associate vice provost for digital education and innovation at Duke University, excited about the possibility to make wide-scale improvements in how colleges teach.

What does it mean to be a good citizen? That question is complicated by today's digital environment, since today's kids—and adults too—live in both online and offline worlds. EdSurge sat down with one of the foremost experts on helping navigate these issues: Marialice Curran, founder and executive director of the Digital Citizenship Institute. Curran suggests some simple things anyone can do to be...

Today we’re talking about teaching using popular culture, and we’re focusing on a quirky TV comedy called The Good Place. The show is led by Michael Schur, who previously wrote for The Office and Parks and Recreation. But there’s an unusual person in the writer’s room of The Good Place—an academic philosopher from Clemson University, professor Todd May—one of our guests today. But can a network si...

This week on the podcast we’re talking about news literacy, and the challenge of teaching students to navigate the relentless flow of information they get through social media and websites and YouTube and ... podcasts. Our guest, Peter Adams, has years of experience working with students like Luquin, first as a classroom teacher, then as a college instructor, and currently as senior vice president...

What happens when a popular theory of market research used by fast-food restaurants (to do things like improve their milkshakes) is applied to the process of choosing a college? We talked to Michael Horn, co-author of a new book that does just that. But does it make sense to bring a theory from dollar-menu items to higher education?

For this week’s podcast, we’re looking at the role that African-American scholars and teachers have played in preserving the history of slavery and its aftermath, which in so many ways is still not widely known and appreciated. We talk with scholars who helped mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in what would become America. Episode page: https://www.edsurge.com/news/20...

This week we’re talking about cybersecurity at schools—and how secure—or in some cases how vulnerable—the tech systems in school systems are. At the center of our story: Bill Demirkapi, who managed to bust into two key student information systems of his high school, then tried to tell the edtech companies to get them to fix their software—with mixed results. Episode page: https://www.edsurge.com/n...

What is your favorite satirical take on higher education? Maybe Jane Smiley’s "Moo." Or Don DeLillo’s "White Noise"? Or it could be Rodney Dangerfield’s "Back to School." Let’s face it, there almost endless works of fiction poking fun at academic life. As the summer ends and we head into the fall semester, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate this rich tradition of parody of academic life, and...

What if teaching the scientific method in schools is giving students the wrong idea about how rigorous work is done by scientists? That’s the unusual hypothesis being made by John Rudolph, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “How We Teach Science: What's Changed, and Why It Matters.” We sat down with Rudolph to talk about the fascinating history of teaching...

People have a tendency to treat technology and big data as neutral, sterile and immune to mortal failings. Yet the digital tools we use at schools, jobs and home don’t simply fall from the sky—humans produce them. And that means human biases can and do slip right into the algorithms. We talked with Ruha Benjamin, associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of...

When you hear the word “inventor,” you might think of household names like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or the Wright brothers. But today, there are plenty of young inventors whose names you’ve never heard of—not yet, anyway. These are middle and high school students who have developed solutions to major economic and social challenges, ranging from health care and transportation to agricu...

Parents are giving up custody of their kids to get need-based college financial aid. That was a headline last week in ProPublica Illinois, and it got people talking once again about the madness around college admissions. In comments on the ProPublica article and in other online forums, though, plenty of people chimed in expressing sympathy for these Chicago-area parents, calling their move a cleve...

One of the most popular topics these days in education is mastery learning—the idea that the pace of a class should match what each student is ready to learn, as a way to ensure they’re really grasping material. But it can be hard to show educators what mastery learning looks like in practice. Cara Johnson has extensive experience both teaching and helping others using the approach. She talked wit...

What if you could map every book and article assigned in college courses around the world and see which authors are making the most impact? A project run out of Columbia University is working to do just that. It’s called the Open Syllabus Project, and this month its leaders released a new version of their tool that analyzes assignment lists from more than six million syllabi. But there could be un...

Online tutoring is big business—especially for a growing number of companies that connect native English-speaking teachers with children in China for live video lessons. These services can work really well as second jobs teachers in the U.S., who can wake up early and get in a couple of hours of tutoring before going to their classroom jobs. But some teachers say they’ve wound up facing unexpected...

For most of us, hearing something just once isn’t nearly enough to commit it to memory. But with today’s crowded curriculum, sometimes one explanation is all kids get. Ten years ago, Sal Khan set out to change that with his Khan Academy videos, which let kids replay lessons as many times as they want. EdSurge sat down with Khan to discuss his vision for reinventing schools, his recent focus on tes...

“Impact investing” is a term that has become increasingly trendy. And one of the largest higher-ed foundations—The Lumina Foundation—is getting in the game. John Duong, managing director of Lumina Impact Ventures, explains how venture capital supports its mission to drive better postsecondary outcomes, and why “impact-washing” (a spin on whitewashing) is increasingly becoming a concern.

This week’s podcast features an unlikely education leader. His name is Anthony Johnson, and the title of his book explains the unlikely part: it’s called High School Dropout to Teacher of the Year. Johnson’s story is about second chances and falling in love, the surprising parallels between his work as a correctional officer and his work as an educator and what it means to reinvent the system that...

Plenty of groups these days are trying to reinvent college. There are entrepreneurs and foundations rushing to try to offer higher education in new shapes, sizes, formats and price points. Meanwhile at colleges, researchers and innovators are diving into learning science and experimenting with new teaching methods as well. But those groups don’t always talk to each other, or even know about each o...

In Louisiana, educators have to worry about privacy when it comes to technology. The state has perhaps the most restrictive data-privacy law in the country when it comes to education, where violators can be punished by up to six months in prison or $10,000 in fines. EdSurge sat down with Kim Nesmith, director of data governance, privacy, and edtech for the Louisiana Department of Education, to tal...

“Someone should create a Center for Social Solutions, identify a handful of challenges and try to work on them over the next decade.” That directive guided professor, historian and author Earl Lewis to start just such a center at the University of Michigan. EdSurge sat down with Lewis to talk about how the center is using research to tackle some of the biggest challenges our world faces today.