Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire • Hacker News Board

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#31

Post by ralmidani » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #17

ralmidani wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re actually right, I had also taken very basic “intro” courses locally before taking the MIT course, and Grimson was the first person to explain Big O to me. Having already done some Python and C++ probably helped get more out of that course, as well. But some people can’t drop thousands or even hundreds of dollars to have a prof or TA hold their hand as they learn programming essentials. They might have to put i…

I really liked 6.001 but I already have a fair bit of programming experience although I don't do it professionally and am not a CS major--so I got a lot out of it. MIT has a doubtless deserved reputation as being a bit of a firehose but even so, I can't imagine showing up on campus (during normal times) and learning the basics of programming including even the basics of using a command line on the side while taking n…

Thanks for recommending the Michigan course! I have mentored/tutored in the past but am currently too busy. If people contact me regarding lessons, I can politely redirect them to that course.

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#32

Post by ghaff » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

mennis16 wrote: post #27

ghaff wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even MIT, which was pretty early on to online content with OCW, if you look at some of the early statements and materials, was very clearly positioned as raw materials to help teachers assemble their own courses. There was very little audio or video. It was pretty clear that MIT was taking some care to not release something that was potentially competitive with even auditing an actual MIT class.

When was this? Not doubting you but by the time I came across OCW in 2012 there were quite a few courses with video lectures, at least you could cover the standard frosh year curriculum with videos and much of the year 1 CS courses. So that gets you an "associates" worth of CS content right there, and this was before I recall MOOCs being a hot topic more broadly. There are also still quite a few MIT courses that have…

Early 2000s (so about a decade earlier). Here's a quote from then-MIT president on introducing OCW.

MIT President Charles Vest said that “We are not providing an MIT education on the Web. We are providing our core materials that are the infrastructure that undergirds an MIT education. Real education requires interaction, the interaction that is part of American teaching. We think that OpenCourseWare will make it possible for faculty here and elsewhere to concentrate even more on the actual process of teaching, on the interactions between faculty and students that are the real core of learning.”

ADDED: Video was not nearly as democratized at the time. YouTube wasn't founded until 2005.

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#33

Post by bachmeier » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

cjf4 wrote: post #7

Taking CS50 feels similar to watching a movie that has an auteur’s fingerprints all over it. Every word in the lecture, every technology, and every problem set has been carefully crafted to fit together to create a cohesive experience. College instructors everywhere should take the course to see what the zenith of multimedia online education looks like.

I've watched some of the lectures of CS50 in the past, and the one question that has always come into my mind is this: "How do these lectures help you learn at a deep level?" I already knew most of the material, so I found it to be an entertaining review, but that's different from a beginner needing to learn new material at a deep level. I kind of think it'd be a nightmare to take good notes while watching his lectures. I'm not bashing the lecture style, but if I were a student, I'd prefer a good textbook to those lectures.

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.

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#34

Post by Dumblydorr » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

ralmidani wrote: post #2

I agree that Malan is an amazing educator and both energetic and energizing. I took CS50 via the Extension School, and got a chance to meet him when we showcased our final project. He is very approachable and down-to-Earth. 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.

I think it's a subtle way to hint that CS50 is cool and hip to younger folks, whereas to younger folks, the old and less technically savvy MOOC felt less engaging. I don't agree, I just think new Yorker used it to contrast the courses.

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#35

Post by jcq3 » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

Perhaps people appreciate this course because the prestigious Harvard school is behind it. I would traduce that bias by "a good school involves necessarily good courses" . Is it true though?

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#36

Post by nanna » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

It should be noted that such a slick class has had the priviledge of being granted the kind of institutional suport which is extremely rare across higher education today, at least in the West. Being allocated the same module for 13 years? Having it be the only module you teach? Having an entire production team at the ready?

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.

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#37

Post by arcturus17 » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #33

cjf4 wrote: post #7

Taking CS50 feels similar to watching a movie that has an auteur’s fingerprints all over it. Every word in the lecture, every technology, and every problem set has been carefully crafted to fit together to create a cohesive experience. College instructors everywhere should take the course to see what the zenith of multimedia online education looks like.

I've watched some of the lectures of CS50 in the past, and the one question that has always come into my mind is this: "How do these lectures help you learn at a deep level?" I already knew most of the material, so I found it to be an entertaining review, but that's different from a beginner needing to learn new material at a deep level. I kind of think it'd be a nightmare to take good notes while watching his lectur…

1. There’s a companion C book for the course 2. The labs go into much more detail compared to lectures 3. The psets can be Nintendo-hard; you’ll be doing devilish pointer stuff by week 3 or 4.

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.

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#38

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

> Malan sees it differently: it is wasteful, he said, to have thousands of teachers, in computer science or other fields, all doing the work of devising similar curricula. Good programmers spend much of their time “refactoring” software—editing it to reduce inefficiencies, or “code bloat.” Malan’s teaching method pursues a similar objective. “I don’t think we want just one introduction to computer science and one introduction to psychology or any such field,” he said. “But there’s probably a number around dozens—hundreds—that makes more sense?” Rather than threaten the livelihoods of professors or the independence of institutions, such consolidation would, Malan believes, free teachers to do their best work. And holding online courses to the same standards as in-person ones would allow students beyond the small, predominantly privileged groups who enroll in places like Harvard to access the highest-quality instruction.

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.

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#39

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #33

cjf4 wrote: post #7

Taking CS50 feels similar to watching a movie that has an auteur’s fingerprints all over it. Every word in the lecture, every technology, and every problem set has been carefully crafted to fit together to create a cohesive experience. College instructors everywhere should take the course to see what the zenith of multimedia online education looks like.

I've watched some of the lectures of CS50 in the past, and the one question that has always come into my mind is this: "How do these lectures help you learn at a deep level?" I already knew most of the material, so I found it to be an entertaining review, but that's different from a beginner needing to learn new material at a deep level. I kind of think it'd be a nightmare to take good notes while watching his lectur…

> I'm not bashing the lecture style, but if I were a student, I'd prefer a good textbook to those lectures.

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.

Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

#40

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #24

ghaff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, normally as quick to comment on casual ageism as anyone. But, in this case, it's the New Yorker and I think they're just humanizing the story. (And, per another comment, with respect to "knowing their audience" I expect the New Yorker readership skews relatively old.)

I hate to read such articles. I don’t understand why they are so popular in the Anglosphere. It always comes off as if I am reading a failed fiction writer, not a journalist.

I don't exactly know how to explain why I like this writing style, but I really do. I even subscribed to the New Yorker for several years but ended up canceling when I realized how far behind I was falling in reading it. The dang thing comes every week and is at a high enough average quality level that each issue is worth reading cover to cover.

Also, a decent chunk of the content in the magazine is actual fiction by actual accomplished fiction writers (not "failed" ones). You don't tend to see it linked from HN obviously, but that's very much the vibe they're going for. Think of it as part commentary on the times and part literary fiction magazine. That may not be your cup of tea but it is appealing to lots of people.