Technology and Education After the Pandemic

Have online and remote learning been effective as alternatives to in-person teaching during the pandemic? (Not really.) Have designers of massive open online courses taken into account the latest discoveries from cognitive scientists and neuroscientists about how students learn best? (Sort of.) And after the pandemic, how should K-12 schools and universities continue to use technology to meet the growing demand for high-quality learning experiences? (The possibilities are endless, enticing, and also perilous.) In this episode we talk through those questions with Sanjay Sarma, vice president of open learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is one of the founding members of edX and a supplier of hundreds of the world’s most popular MOOCs. Last August, Sarma and co-author Luke Yoquinto explored the successes and failures of 21st-century education in Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, and in this conversation Sarma and I worked through the book’s main arguments.