It's a mistake to think this is one man's achievement, and a model to universities everywhere of the kinds of quality that can be achieved if they give their staff a break from the endless restructurings, precarity, admin, overwork and burnouts that characterises the vast majority of their situations.
"Malan’s contract at Harvard allows him to focus almost exclusively on CS50; even the research he publishes centers mainly on the class...Malan’s method of remote teaching is not easily replicable; CS50’s pyrotechnics would not be possible without an unusually deep well of resources and his own fanatical commitment"
THIS. So much.
Having just done an online talk, I can tell you that the audio-visual stuff was BY FAR the most annoying.
More expensive webcam, add way more lighting to my office, get an expensive lavalier mic (highly recommended for lectures--earphones with boom mics drive me nuts as the monitoring has enough delay to be annoying--probably could remove that with a $500 audio interface that has DSP monitoring), learn OBS, realize my laptop has nowhere near the power necessary to drive OBS, build a new Desktop machine outfitted for video (that barely even notices OBS), relearn OBS now that it works beautifully, realize that I don't know even a fraction of OBS but have to get things done, record the lecture, and finally have it presented in potato-cam because the people running the thing have laptops with less power than mine and can't playback the hi-res video I sent them.
The lecture maybe took 40 hours to do. Maybe.
The A/V--probably 120+ hours. And probably will take another 120+ the next round because I'll be more capable with the tools.
An online university would have probably been a better fit for me in the first place, but at the time I didn't want to do it due to the reduced prestige associated with it.
Why have 10.000 poor versions of a lesson accross the country instead of teachers or parents guiding classes based on curated, great online classes?
Gilbert Strang comes to mind as an example of great explanations without the TV Show production quality.
I wish my country did something like Khan Academy but for more subjects, and in Spanish
I really think this could feed into a rich ecosystem of free, online distributed research and publications. Ideally that could lead to public grants and funding for research outside of the university system.
Maybe one day.
Tufts had a professor who was nationally recognized for incredible intro CS lessons: https://www.computer.org/profiles/benjamin-hescott
They denied him tenure: https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2017/08/29/professor-computer-sc...
also i guess worth pointing out that it's win-win for Harvard to be giving this kind of support, with the attendant marketing it drives and the implication that if you take this class you can be the next Zuck.
I also don't understand why the course seems to cover everything and the kitchen sink. It covers a rather wide swath of material and programming languages. It's my personal learning and teaching style that courses should be more focused and concise. The course content also seems very trendy and software engineering job-oriented, and I think learning should be removed from trends. My fear is that students will come out of the course with a very narrow view of computer science such that they think C, Python, HTML/CSS/JS, SQL are the only games in town.
Are MLs (SML, Ocaml, F#) or Lisps/Schemes mentioned at all in this course? I don't even see the point in teaching C as an intro language anymore. Python as well, which has nothing going for it as a language aside from library support and industry use.
I'd be interested in how both students and other professors at Harvard feel about the course's success given their experience in courses that follow.
It’s not a bad thing that Malan has the privilege to be in a position where he can successfully focus on perfecting a single class. In fact it’s fantastic for us all that he’s doing this work. It’s just important to acknowledge the privileges he has so we don’t look at normal teachers and say “if you only tried a bit harder, couldn’t you do something like this?” It’s not just about effort and intelligence, it’s also about the resources that are put behind the educator.
Most major research uni profs are obliged to teach 2-3 courses per semester. Most would prefer to teach fewer or more advanced courses. Only those who love to teach revel in intro courses, and from what I've seen, that's less than 10% of profs at big name research-driven schools.
College instructors everywhere should take the course to see what the zenith of multimedia online education looks like.
In contrast, I watched all the lectures of Martin Odersky's functional programming MOOC. I learned a ton from that even when I'd already seen the material. His presentations were lower tech, with less razzle-dazzle, but my goal was to learn. His presentations are optimized (intentionally or not) to facilitate good note taking and later application.
The happy-go-lucky, flashy tone of the course is completely misleading. It is a challenging course, so much so that it’s been the subject of numerous cheating scandals from students caving under the pressure over the years.
As for depth, this is a first intro to CS meant not only for CS majors but for people from other domains (Econ, humanities, hard sciences, what have you). The style is meant to cater to people who might not be a priori fascinated by flipping bits. Still quite a bit of people decide to concentrate on CS after taking the class, so it must be doing something right in that sense...
The course is not mandatory for CS concentrators, so if you already know your fundamentals you can jump right into CS51 (functional programming) or CS61 (intro to systems), which are outstanding courses but much more terse in style.
I suspect you're in the minority here. The majority of students are more engaged by a good professor lecturing on material than by reading a textbook. This is especially true for introductory classes which CS50 is, because a lot of the students are from other majors and are being introduced to the entire field for the first time. It's hard to enter a new field just by reading a textbook.
Definitely didn't seem super beginner friendly after the first week or so. Perhaps I'm too slow at picking this stuff up.
I learned basic programming by doing CS50x. The purpose of the lectures is to introduce the concepts in an engaging way, and spark interest in doing it yourself. Then the learning happens in the weekly assignments, where you have to actually implement the ideas and get your code past the automated testing. I'd say the assignments are 3/4 of the course.
It's a very nice introduction to programming for someone who hasn't done any before. And in the end that's what it is - an introduction, not a deep dive.
There are supplemental textbooks listed for the course:
https://cs50.harvard.edu/college/2020/spring/syllabus/#books
Also, confused why you expect depth from something with "intro" in its title.
more often that not, as a CS student for most core cs classes, i have barely written any notes.
I have been interested in pedagogy and talking with all the great teachers, the one thing I see in common is the ability to update, improve, and iterate. Constantly. Pretty much every time the course is taught there is something slightly different. There is risk there (sometimes changes are harmful) but that is how you make the course better.
My guess is that is the case here, and that the course 13 years ago was not nearly as refined. But he had a vision and stuck with it.
But what was the point of contrasting his “glossy black hair” with the white hair of MIT’s Grimson/Guttag? Very cheap shot, and not even subtly ageist.
They know their audience.
ADDED: I'm also not sure what to think about C in an intro course in this day and age. Sure, as a CS major, or even as part of a good programming curriculum, understanding some of what's going on under the covers is important. But that feels like a Level 2-ish topic at this point.
At the time the story in this article begins, administrators at many places were completely unfamiliar with the general idea behind open content distribution. In such places, online systems for course content were seen as a way of locking down the intellectual property that courses represent, not to distribute it. Where I was at, faculty were explicitly admonished not to distribute any online course material because it was seen as leaking university IP. Course management systems were seen as a way to deliver materials online securely so as to ensure that they weren't widely distributed. Even if someone wanted to put the effort into something that might now be called a MOOC, it was doubly frowned upon because you were putting effort into teaching rather than research (especially if you were untenured), and triply so because you were putting effort into distributing courses online, which was a fringe activity.
By the time MOOCs came about and got a lot of press, and many of us were sort of shaking our heads at what seemed inevitable, it was a little too little too late. In online space, where social factors like reputation become amplified 100-fold, it's difficult to compete or add to the reputational weight of places like MIT or Harvard. Adding to this was the constant monetizing mindset, of trying to lock down materials, not recognizing the advertising/popularizing role that open content distribution enables. Then too was a sort of "so what" feeling, because in the absence of something like a pandemic, who really cares, from the perspective of the administration -- students come to campus and that's where the dollars come from; MOOCs and online course distribution of whatever form were seen as experimental, the realm of the extension service which is valued but only to a point.
There's lots of issues the piece doesn't get into, or only gets into in a half-hearted way, which is how these types of online teaching dynamics really mess with the traditional structures. So instead of having an interesting conversation about how unfamiliar it is for universities to be dealing with Course A at Institution 1 competing with Course B at Institution 2, it recapitulates the discussion in terms of Malan, which misses the bigger picture entirely. These issues are not about one instructor of one course at one university.
Maybe I'm just getting jaded, but I feel like this piece does a disservice to the behemoth of problems at universities represented by the online instructional debacle we've witnessed. Like lots of things, the pandemic is exposing widespread systemic problems, not creating them.
100% agreed with this, and this is something I've often thought about. An unbelievable amount of work is spent replicating the same curricula, lectures, and course materials over and over and over again. Think of how many calculus textbooks there are for example: there's thousands in English alone, as math professors are incentivized to spend years of their lives writing a textbook they can then have their students buy every semester, and thus create a second revenue stream for themselves.
There aren't a million encyclopedias anymore; Wikipedia has pretty much dominated that space. We need something in the education space to fill that niche as well. Imagine how much better an experience most students will have if, instead of watching a random teacher out of millions teach a subject, and using one out of thousands of textbooks, they are instead watching the absolute best lectures and using the single best amazing compendium textbook of knowledge for the subject material. There are some projects that are trying this (e.g. the Wikimedia Foundation has Wikibooks), but none are that successful yet. I can think of a variety of reasons why, mostly having to do with inertia, but the reasons why it should succeed are far more compelling.
Of course, things can change and this course is certainly very admirable. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
And yes, I know a lot of this already exists to some extent, but where it gets lost is in its availability, centralization, and being targeted at teachers only rather than also being available to the students.
Honestly, they're not incentivized by money. The vast majority of textbooks don't make the professors any money at all.
They may be incentivized by the tenure process/promotion at their university (esp. in smaller colleges), but that's an entirely different scenario.
"You paid $130? Best I can do is 5 bucks"
Don’t hear much about the Surface Hub these days. It’s alive and well?
Microsoft released an updated version - the Surface Hub 2S - about a year ago. The intention was this could be upgraded in-situ using a cartridge to become the Surface Hub 2X. The 2X was meant to have all the hotness Microsoft were showing off in demos at the time (it has now been cancelled - [1]).
I procured one for some R&D, it's only sold through OEMs and service providers, for around $10k (more if you get the steelcase stand and battery pack).
For what it is it's quite good: it's industrial design and feature-set goes well beyond a lot of the competition (Google Jamboard, etc), although its applications are still quite niche.
One nice feature is you can output the touch input to a connected Windows laptop, making it a (rather expensive) huge multi-touch external monitor.
[1]:https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21119915/microsoft-surface...
And I never told her it was from Harvard.
Early on with MOOCs, there was a Harvard literature course I was very excited about taking on Greek myth or something like that. I think I made it through about the first half of the first lecture. The whole thing felt incredibly pretentious and generally awful. (And, yes, I have taken literature courses at good colleges that were much more interesting.)
The thing that sets apart good instructors from mediocre ones is the passion they have toward teaching (esp. the good ones seem to have empathy as in they want students to succeed and understand the materials that the instructors themselves probably took a good amount of time digesting when they were in students' shoes).
I was at my best during those first months. Experience and empathy all help but I could notice how being only slightly enthusiastic was hindering my performance.
The entire environment, the culture, that Professor Malan has created is absolutely fantastic and I am incredibly grateful that Harvard has made this content available.
One more thing, with the course needing to be quickly adapted to Zoom last spring, I really noticed the importance of being able to give students rubrics and tests so that they could run their code with different inputs and make sure they were getting the correct outputs. That might seem obvious, but in the past the class was often in lab mode where I could walk around the class and work with them interactively.
I suspect they’ve automated since.
I think that this course in particular really highlights the impact of a good teacher. In college I've had multiple professors who quickly made my dislike subjects that otherwise I would have really liked.
I did it. I found Prof. Malan to be very, very engaging. I wish one day everyone in the world will have access to this level of education for free, and not just for CS50. For everything.
Secret maybe in very good covering of complex stuff and teaching style: pressure, fast moving between topics, playing with auditory in tv-show format, and nearly screaming to get attention while needed.
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