This Week with EdSurge

Don’t even think of lecturing to these college students. The 14 students who just finished up the spring session of EdSurge Independent want something more active, and they want to have a voice as colleges rethink how they teach and support people on their campuses. EdSurge sat down with three of these students--Amanda Wahlstedt, Jared Silver and Rosie Foulger--to talk about how they viewed the bu...

From Apple, Google and Microsoft battling to take over the classroom, to random acts in both K-12 and higher education compromising the private information of millions of vulnerable students, 2017 has been no short of edtech news. But when it comes to the biggest stories of the year thus far, what are the writers themselves—education reporters—reading and thinking about? While at the Education Wri...

Sara Goldrick-Rab's latest book is based on six years of studying how students struggle with paying for college. She argues that recent experiments in having students sign "income-share agreements," or ISAs, is part of a broader effort to drain public resources from higher education.

There are few individuals out there who can list both “two-time TED speaker” and “doctoral student at Harvard University” on their resume. Clint Smith is one of those people—though when you ask him about his work, he doesn’t immediately voice those accolades. Rather, he talks about his writings, and the time he’s spent teaching poetry to incarcerated men in Massachusetts. There’s also something el...

There are many unanswered questions about the unprecedented sale of Kaplan University, a for-profit institution with several online programs but falling enrollments, to Purdue University, one of the top public universities in the nation. To try to get some answers, EdSurge recently sat down with Donald Graham, chairman of Graham Holdings Company, the group that sold the 15-campus Kaplan University...

“Personalized learning” is a term that is no stranger to interpretation—even to the point that writers have started to argue about whether it’s worth defining or not (just check out here and here.) But no matter how a school or district defines it, is it worth including technology in that definition—or does edtech merely distract educators from understanding and delivering on what students really...

Before the “LMS” became an acronym and a hotly contested market of its own, Martin Dougiamas was writing code to share his “object oriented dynamic learning environment” across the web. That project would go on to become Moodle, one of the most widely-used learning management system across the world today. Just don’t let Dougiamas catch you calling his pet project of the past two decades an LMS. T...

McComb School District down in McComb, Mississippi doesn’t just believe in the power of technology when it comes to personalized learning. In fact, for superintendent Dr. Cederick Ellis and Summit Elementary School principal Lakya Taylor-Washington, the bigger asset in going personalized comes down to removing arbitrary grade level assignments and creating “learning labs,” a style of competency-ba...

A for-profit startup recently launched what it calls an alternative to traditional college, that takes only one year to complete, is advised closely by big-name employers, and that costs nothing at first, though students have to later pay back a portion of their incomes. What’s missing are the general-education curriculum. It’s called MissionU, and the reaction has been mixed, and passionate. Some...

“Flexible.” It’s a word that often pops up in conversations about redesigning learning environments, relating to choices in furniture or movable walls. But according to Danish Kurani, redesigning 21st century classrooms goes much deeper than merely achieving flexibility—it involves going all the way back to considering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Kurani is a licensed architect who focuses his wor...

Southern New Hampshire University is known as a place trying new things, and one thing they hope to do is create a culture of change on campus. To do that, they've created a sandbox--an innovation lab called the Sandbox Collaborative. We sat down with the executive director of the sandbox, Michelle Weise, to get a tour of this unusual lab and hear why she thinks colleges need to change.

A few weeks back, EdSurge traveled to SXSWedu to hear talks about technology and chat with educators and entrepreneurs. But while there, we met someone who spoke about how edtech could better serve students with learning differences in a manner we’d never heard before. In fact, that individual, Ben Gurewitz, is a student with learning differences himself. Gurewitz is a Bay Area native and currentl...

Students at the University of Central Florida are busy, and it’s not always with classes. They have sports to play, student organizations to run, even parties to go to. So to keep class schedules as flexible as possible, and to offer more sections without putting up new buildings, UCF leaders have turned to offering more online courses for students on campus. But are those students missing out? On...

It’s pretty clear that very few people in education enjoy those typical sit-and-get professional development sessions. And when blended learning gets thrown into the mix, the situation gets even more complicated—what happens when educators seem afraid of products? Who should deliver PD, the administrators or the teachers? Talk to administrators, and they have some answers to these questions—as wel...

Cal State Channel Islands offers a two-week online training course for professors at the university called Humanizing Online Learning, with tips and strategies for forging personal connections with remote students. The course's creator and instructor, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, and the university's vice president for technology and innovation, Michael Berman, talk about the effort, and about how onl...

Jacob Allen was the first-ever youth president for the NAACP in Wisconsin and a Teach for America corps member in Chicago. But it wasn’t either of those roles that landed him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list this past January. Rather, it was his efforts to bring an important topic back into K-12 schools—the idea of a student’s self-identity. In 2013, Allen and his cofounder Marie Dandie created pilo...

An unusual coding school called 42 opened a campus just outside of Silicon Valley last year. It's free -- for those who pass a month-long coding challenge -- and it focuses on peer-to-peer learning, meaning there are no professors. Brittany Bir, chief operating officer of 42 USA, explains how it works, and whether there are any lessons for traditional educational institutions.

In Tennessee, the education system made headlines a few years back when the state announced the “Tennessee Promise”—an initiative granting thousands of high school students the opportunity to attend two years of free community college. After Governor Bill Haslam announced the scholarship program amongst a flurry of news, students immediately began applying to receive funds to put towards tuition a...

As more colleges dive deeper into their own completion and retention data, they don't always like what they see. Karen Stout, president of Achieving the Dream, talks about how community colleges can face their own internal report cards, and take action.

A few years back, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) found itself in the news for the rollout of iPads districtwide, which some ilsteners out there might remember. Since then, what’s going on with technology in Southern California’s biggest public school district? Well, in one region—the local Northwest sector of the district—administrators, schools and teachers have been busy expandi...

Last year, the U. of Michigan launched a major campus-wide effort to encourage a culture of continual improvement in teaching. The university's president, Mark Schlissel, explains why, and weighs in on the MOOC craze, fake news, and the value of higher education.

This week, we take you to Auckland. A few months back, our own Betsy Corcoran traveled to New Zealand, where she sat down with Pete Hall. Right now, Pete is the newest principal of the Taupaki School, but he also has a background in entrepreneurship and teaching. Back during this interview, he served as the Educator Engagement Lead for Network for Learning (N4L), and principal at Upper Harbour Pri...

Donald Trump is about to take office, and one of the many places where change is coming will be the education department. To find out what that could mean, we checked in with Richard Culatta, who served as director of the education department’s Office of Educational Technology in the Obama Administration and is now Chief Innovation Officer for the state of Rhode Island.

The classroom. Since the 1950s, the setup of your average second, sixth or tenth grade classroom hasn’t changed all that much. Desks lined up, students facing forward, teacher up at the front giving a lecture. The same can be said for higher education oftentimes, as well. What gives? In early October, EdSurge hosted the Austin Tech for Schools Summit in Texas, and while there, heard a bit about wh...

It’s here, it’s here! Once again, we’ve come upon that week in December when we celebrate all things programming. December 5 kicks off national Computer Science Week, and what better way to start the celebrations than with a perfectly-themed interview? Today, we’ve got Jeffrey Martin on the EdSurge podcast. The founder of an organization called "honorCode" recently won the $500,000 Global Change t...