Carl sits down with Laura Weiss, senior director of commercial strategy and growth initiatives at Pearson, to explore how dual enrollment and early career pathways are helping students move more efficiently and affordably toward their professional goals. Discussion focuses on high-quality, virtual asynchronous courses that support a wide range of learners, and how these models are reshaping the journey from high school to career. This week’s episode of The Idea Spark is brought to you by Pearson...
Jun 12, 2025•21 min
Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs are evolving, becoming more deeply integrated into mainstream high school curricula. Alongside this transition is an expanded perspective on career exploration, and a stronger emphasis on student agency and well-being. In this first episode of a new series, The Idea Spark podcast, host Carl Hooker speaks with Elyse Monahan, a former CTE educator and current National Product Sales Specialist at Pearson. They discuss the transformation of CTE, and how ...
May 01, 2025•22 min
IdeaSpark Episode 0 by EdSurge Podcast
May 01, 2025•2 min
When the only school in Donora, Pennsylvania, closed a few years ago, it hit the town’s residents hard. Now the building may be the town’s best hope, as a community college considers setting up in the former school. A University of Pittsburgh professor spent three years documenting life in this fading town for an unusual podcast series that ran late last year. Education was a key theme. On this week's EdSurge Podcast, we talk to the professor about her takeaways for the role of education in the ...
Jan 14, 2025•54 min
One long-time expert on preventing student cheating argues that understanding why students cheat is key to making adjustments in teaching to prevent cheating with AI. It's the argument of Tricia Bertram Gallant, a longtime expert in academic integrity who is director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California San Diego who co-wrote a new book, “The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. See show notes at EdSurge.com: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2025...
Jan 07, 2025•58 min
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? This episode originally ran in January 2024, and was the most-listened-to episode of the year.
Dec 10, 2024•55 min
We found the theme song for the EdSurge Podcast on a free music library years ago, after spending hours clicking around searching for the right sound. The music turns out to have an unusual origin story, as we learned when we tracked down the artist this week for a conversation about the intersection of music, creativity and teaching.
Dec 03, 2024•43 min
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.
Nov 19, 2024•35 min
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.
Nov 08, 2024•1 hr
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.
Nov 04, 2024•48 min
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.
Oct 27, 2024•58 min
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.
Oct 21, 2024•38 min
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?
Oct 13, 2024•33 min
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.
Oct 06, 2024•44 min
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.
Sep 29, 2024•1 hr 4 min
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.
Sep 23, 2024•1 hr 3 min
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.
Sep 17, 2024•39 min
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.
Sep 10, 2024•34 min
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
Sep 03, 2024•50 min
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.
Aug 27, 2024•44 min
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/...
Aug 20, 2024•44 min
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-pow...
Aug 13, 2024•44 min
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.
Aug 06, 2024•37 min
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.
Jul 30, 2024•40 min
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.
Jul 23, 2024•43 min
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
Jul 16, 2024•35 min
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.
Jul 09, 2024•16 min
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.
Jun 25, 2024•58 min
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.
Jun 11, 2024•42 min
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.
Jun 04, 2024•55 min
