This Week with EdSurge

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Does Tech Support Personalized Learning—or Distract Us From What’s Really Important? May 09, 2017

Show notes

“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 need? In early March, three education research experts—Eileen Rudden of Boston’s LearnLaunch, Chris Liang-Vergara of Chicago’s LEAP Innovations, and Muhammed Chaudhry of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley Education Foundation—joined EdSurge on a panel to discuss the very answer to this muddy and oftentimes challenging question. Check it out on this edition of the EdSurge podcast!

Why Moodle’s Mastermind, Martin Dougiamas, Still Believes in Edtech After Two Decades May 02, 2017

Show notes

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. Those three letters make him wince—just a bit. “I prefer to say learning platform,” he says in this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast. “Sometimes we call it an LMS maker,” he adds. Moodle’s “flexible modularity” allows anyone to “build the perfect LMS.”

Do Students, Principals and Superintendents See Eye-to-Eye on Eliminating Grade Levels? Apr 26, 2017

Show notes

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-based learning that Summit has been experimenting with since 2015. At Summit, “scholars” are grouped by readiness and performance—not by traditional grade levels—and indicate evidence of mastery by completing projects at their own pace. In theory, the rollout and success of this instructional approach sounds feasible, but oftentimes, it’s the adults who explain how the program works—without the opinions or inputs of students. How about Summit students adjusting to the change? What do they like? What do they wish was different? In order to hear exactly how different stakeholders feel about this competency-based system, EdSurge brought two Summit students, Kianna and Patricia, together with Ellis and Taylor-Washington to ask the question: “Do students, principals and superintendents all see eye-to-eye on saying goodbye to grade levels?”

Reactions to a College Alternative: Debating the Merits of MissionU Apr 18, 2017

Show notes

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 academics have trashed it as a kind of employment service passing itself off as education. While others have praised it for trying to shake up the higher education system. For this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast, we decided to try something different. We put together a virtual panel discussion, inviting people with a variety of views on MissionU to face off—including its founder, and a critic. Our hope was to start a dialogue and get beyond misperceptions on both sides. That means that the episode is a bit longer than usual, but it gets pretty lively, and we hope you’ll listen through to the end.

Beware of the Word ‘Flexible’: Architect Danish Kurani on Designing 21st Century Schools Apr 06, 2017

Show notes

“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 work on learning spaces, and currently teaches a “Learning Environments for Tomorrow” course at the Harvard Graduate School of Education every year. Having worked on locations ranging from Denver’s Columbine Elementary to SELNY, a psychotherapy clinic and adult learning center in New York, Kurani has seen and used a variety of tactics to implement learning design in pursuit of specific goals. This week, EdSurge sat down with him to hear about the most common design constraints, architecture gone wrong, and the work his firm recently conducted on the Code Next Lab in Oakland.

One University's Approach to Innovation: ‘You Have to Go Slow to Go Fast’ Apr 04, 2017

Show notes

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.

What Students With Learning Differences Really Want Us to Know: Q&A with Ben Gurewitz Mar 28, 2017

Show notes

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 currently a freshman at the University of California, Davis—but that represents only a small fraction of how he spends his time. As cofounder of the Diverse Learners Coalition and an active participant in Student Voice, Gurewitz seeks to use his own experiences with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and slow processing disorder as a platform to create change both inside education organizations and amongst the greater populations. Gurewitz came to the EdSurge offices in Burlingame, California to speak about his own learning experiences in K-12, where the education system is failing to reach students, and whether or not technology is the most important component of serving all students.

Why Students Living on Campus Take Online Courses Mar 21, 2017

Show notes

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 this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast, we talked to Dale Whittaker, provost and executive vice president at the University of Central Florida. He’s currently leading another evolution in online teaching, as the institution moves into adaptive learning. They hope that the future of campus learning is for students teaming up to teach each other as they work through online exercises in campus coffee shops.

Dealing with a 'Culture of Fear'—Administrators on PD in the Age of Blended Learning Mar 15, 2017

Show notes

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 well as thoughts about what parts of PD should be left far, far behind. At the EdSurge Tech for Schools Summit in Riverside, EdSurge’s own Michelle Spencer led a panel with Steve Kong (instructional services specialist for Riverside Unified School District), Stepan Mekhitarian (blended learning coordinator for Local District Northwest in Los Angeles USD), Brad Hellickson (student advisor for online learning in Corona Norco Unified) and Michelle Clavijo-Diaz (Global Education Solutions Product Line Manager, HP Inc.) to get their thoughts.

How One University Works to ‘Humanize’ Online Teaching Mar 07, 2017

Show notes

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 online education can involve a surprising amount of passion—and even some tears.

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