When students transfer from community colleges to four-year universities, there’s often culture shock. But those transfers are often more motivated and engaged in the classroom than students who arrive straight from high school, experts say. Hear firsthand from a student in his 30s who recently transferred from a two-year college to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

A new documentary project about Sacagawea, the young woman from the Shoshone tribe who helped guide the Lewis and Clark Expedition back in 1804, lets students chat with an animated chatbot of her. Some educators worry about how faithfully such chatbots can represent history, or whether they might keep students from digging into documents to form their own analysis.

Should kids wear smartwatches? Companies market the wearable devices to kids as young as 4 years old, while digital media experts and educators worry about potential downsides of what some see as an “electronic umbilical cord.” On the EdSurge Podcast this week, we talk with our reporter who spent months researching the issue, Emily Tate Sullivan, and hear her read the full story.

ChatGPT and other chatbots are modeled after how the human brain works. And one of the pioneers of the technology, Terrence Sejnowski, says that what AI has made clear is that we don’t really understand what it means for the human brain to “understand” something.

Many school districts and states have enacted new restrictions on smartphones in classrooms during instructional time, in the name of increasing student engagement and counteracting the negative effects that social media has on youth mental health. We checked in with two teachers and an administrator to hear how the new rules are playing out.

College grads are facing a tough job market these days, with experts saying the college degree holds less of a premium in getting hired than in the past. And as it gets easier to apply to jobs online, applicants say they are getting ghosted by employers or applying to hundreds of jobs with little return. How can colleges respond?

When the web was new back in the late 1990s, Robert Ubell was among those pushing for its adoption to help students who couldn’t get to a campus — over the objections of professors who thought it would always be sub-par. The online learning pioneer says the history of online’s growth offers lessons for those trying teaching innovations today.

Over the past few months, a group of educators has been designing and testing a system that uses ChatGPT to serve as an assistant to instructors as they build courses for students. One key point of the series of design workshops is to learn how educators can make the most effective uses of AI, and where it’s less helpful.

As pandemic relief funds run out — which helped many students connect to the internet to keep up with their studies — there’s a danger that the “homework gap” could suddenly widen, argues Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, in a new book.

The high cost of college is changing how high schoolers think about whether or not to go. A new book, “Rethinking College,” argues for changing the narrative around higher education to be more welcoming to gap years, apprenticeships and other alternatives to college at a time where a degree is so expensive that students worry about its value.

A student who was just a few classes shy of graduating from Morehouse College was excited to try its new online program designed for students trying to finish their degrees. It turned out to be a more challenging process than he expected. Here’s how he helped to improve the program for himself and future students.

A professor has been running an unusual experiment looking for signs of racial and gender bias in AI chatbots. And he has an idea for developing new guardrails that can check against such bias and remove it before it is shown to users. See show notes and links here: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-09-03-ai-chatbots-reflect-cultural-biases-can-they-become-tools-to-alleviate-them

Two instructors made AI chatbot versions of themselves to help teach their classes, and they say class discussion improved as a result. But some teaching experts worry about the long-term implications of bringing in robot teaching assistants.

It’s still popular to prize students who have “grit,” who overcome tough odds to succeed. A book by Alissa Quart called “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream,” looks at why this narrative is so hard to shake — and proposes more community-minded alternatives that could improve equity. This episode first ran in 2022, as the final installment of our Bootstraps series on who gets the best opportunities in American education. For more on the series, see: https://www.edsurge.com/research/guides/bootstraps-a-podcast-series

The Rhodes Scholarship was designed to forge a network of people who would go on to rule the world. So who gets this opportunity? And how is the oldest and best-known graduate scholarship dealing with the legacy of its founder, who used ruthless and racist practices to build the diamond empire that funded the effort? This originally ran in 2022, as part of our Bootstraps series on who gets what educational opportunities in America. Find show notes here:https://www.edsurge.com/news/2022-03-02-power-prestige-and-the-world-s-most-famous-scholarship

The SAT can feel very different to different students. While it can give any college applicant stress, some low-income and minority students see it as evidence that selective colleges don't want them. Can the rise of test-optional policies lead to a new, more equitable era of college admissions? | Guest reporter: Eric Hoover, of The Chronicle of Higher Education | This originally ran in late 2021 as part of our Bootstraps podcast series.

Our current grading system can be a way for kids to prove themselves and win college scholarships, or admission to selective colleges. It can also be a barrier, in sometimes surprising ways. What might a world without letter grades and GPAs look like? This first ran in 2021.

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. This first ran in 2021.

What a debate about the admissions process at one of the best public high schools in the country says about who should get what in education. This first ran in 2021. Find out more on this episode and the rest of the series at: https://www.edsurge.com/research/guides/bootstraps-a-podcast-series

What the odd and surprising history of 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' says about educational equity. This is the first episode in our Bootstraps podcast series on merit, myths and education. This first ran in 2021.

As momentum grows to limit smartphone use in schools, some educators say that the education system can do even more to counter the negative health effects of social media. One award-winning teacher has changed his lessons and the way he teaches to try to help students learn to better focus — even reserving class time for quiet reading away from the distraction of phones.

As more students question the value of college, more high schools are bringing college options into their walls. In the latest installment of our Doubting College series, we visit a high school where students can earn a two-year degree without leaving the building, and where students can also get a jump on other career options that don’t require higher education.

Should AI chatbots be used as tutors? Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, has become one of the most vocal proponents of the idea, and he and his son are featured in a recent demo of ChatGPT’s latest version. But some teaching experts say tutoring should be reserved for humans who can motivate and understand the students they work with. For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we talked with Khan to hear more about his vision of AI tutors and the arguments from his recent book.

Professors are finding that they can’t just go back to teaching as they did before the pandemic and expect the same result. It takes more these days to hold student attention, and convince them to show up. This week we’re rebroadcasting this episode that was reported from the back of large lecture classes to see how teaching is changing. The episode recently won a national award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

One author who spent years researching what brain science says about adolescent learners says their behavior shouldn’t be seen as “deviant” or “immature,” but as a “time of possibility.” And this researcher, Ellen Galinsky, has strong feelings about how to address phones and social media in schools. Read a partial transcript and see show notes at EdSurge: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-05-21-what-brain-science-says-about-how-to-better-teach-teenagers

Today’s high school students are asking more skeptical questions about whether to go to college, or when to go. For this week’s podcast, we visited a career fair at one public high school to ask about the changing ways that high school counselors and education leaders are presenting those choices, and what these students think about their options.

Some educators are trying a different approach to guarding against AI cheating — a “linguistic fingerprinting” technique that borrows a page from the playbook of criminal investigations.

Felecia Russell was born in Jamaica but moved to Los Angeles as a kid. It wasn’t until she started to apply for college that she learned that she was undocumented, which she worried could derail her dreams. She tells her story in a new book, “Amplifying Black Undocumented Student Voices in Higher Education,” which she hopes will help “diversify the narrative” about immigration and education.

When a professor’s research showed that standard methods of teaching problem-solving weren’t working, he set out to figure out what led to more student thinking. His resulting approach is spreading through classrooms, helped by teachers sharing examples on social media. This is a reissue of an episode that first ran in November.

Two years ago the metaverse was getting all the buzz in education circles (and hardly anyone was talking about AI). We checked back in with two educators at the forefront of building a virtual realm for education to see where they see things going now that the hype has faded.

The biggest reason to use VR in education is to tap into a student’s emotional response through immersive experiences, argues Maya Georgieva, director of The New School’s Innovation Center and a leading voice about where VR is headed. Hear her insights in this new interview. Find more details and show notes at: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-04-05-how-vr-can-be-an-empathy-machine-for-education

There’s a growing movement to drop letter grades in favor of new systems that focus on mastery of material rather than chasing points. But opponents worry about losing rigor. A new book hopes to start a national conversation about the issue. More details and show notes at: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-04-02-is-it-time-for-a-national-conversation-about-eliminating-letter-grades

Social studies has been ‘deprioritized’ for decades, in favor of STEM fields, according to some educators. Could AI essay grading help improve the quality of civics and social studies education in schools?

There are key junctures in education that are especially important for helping students feel they belong in school or college. And new research points to better ways to strengthen student-teacher relationships and a sense of belonging, argues Greg Walton, a psychology professor at Stanford University. See show notes and partial transcript at EdSurge: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-03-19-what-new-research-says-about-fostering-a-sense-of-belonging-in-classrooms

There’s growing skepticism of higher education, complete with popular memes on social media that “college is a scam.” Experts in policy and marketing have some suggestions on how to counter that narrative.

A longtime educator worries that the raging culture wars in education create toxic environments that hurt academic learning. He’s started a podcast that brings together people with deeply different views on issues that are most dividing school communities these days and uses depolarizing techniques to try to model repairing such breaches.

Could virtual reality be the key to teaching indigenous ways of knowing to a broad population of students? Jared Ten Brink, a doctoral student in education, is trying to record and teach some key practices of his tribal elders using VR video.

In part two of our podcast series Doubting College, which explores the growing skepticism of higher ed, we talk to students and counselors at a public high school about how students are thinking through their choices after graduation.

A recent study ranked the top professions that are likely to be disrupted by ChatGPT and other new AI technologies, and most of them require college degrees. How does higher ed need to change what it teaches to respond?

Did the education theories that drive today’s schools and teaching practices get off track and do they need a reset — one that gets back to earlier days of oral storytelling? That was the argument of philosopher Kieran Egan, whose educational writings have recently gotten attention.

It can be harder than ever for teachers to manage their relationships with parents, even though digital tools make interactions more frequent. This week’s EdSurge podcast looks at why.

There’s a growing push to add AI literacy as a subject in schools and colleges. But what exactly is AI literacy, and can educators promote curiosity about the subject amid their own concerns, and in some cases fear, around ChatGPT and other generative AI?

Holding student attention may be harder than ever. Even if educators make students put away their smartphones, internet-connected devices have changed the way people relate to others and made it harder for people to be present, argues a Georgetown University professor.

Experts have described this as a 'golden age' of discovery in the area of learning science, with new insights emerging regularly on how humans learn. So what can educators, policymakers and any lifelong learner gain from these new insights? This is a rebroadcast of one of our most popular episodes of 2023.

What were the biggest surprises and trends in education in 2023? Hear from five EdSurge reporters as they give their highlights and analysis and also talk about what they’re digging into in the coming year.

“Why do some schools get better quickly, and others get stuck?” That question drove MIT professor of digital media Justin Reich to write a new book about what he’s learned as a teacher, edtech consultant and professor about making small regular improvements. This episode originally ran this summer.

Paul LeBlanc grew Southern New Hampshire University to an online education powerhouse with more than 200,000 students. This month he announced that he’ll step down as president after the academic year, and he talks to EdSurge about online education, about how he responds to critics who worry that the university has borrowed too much from for-profit universities, and about why his next project involves rethinking teaching with AI.

When the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel started a fellowship 13 years ago that pays young people $100,000 each to not go to college for two years, it made a splash and drew criticism. These days that sort of skepticism of college is far more mainstream. We dive into the history and impact of the program on the first episode of our new podcast series about changing public views of higher ed, called Doubting College.