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Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

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

#71

Post by bobochan »

noelwelsh wrote: post #23
bobochan wrote: post #14

My son took the AP version of the CS50 course last year in high school and showed me some of the exercises and videos. I immediately updated a lot of my own class materials after watching them and relentlessly hyped the edX class as a great companion to what we were learning. The entire environment, the culture, that Professor Malan has created is absolutely fantastic and I am incredibly grateful that Harvard has mad…

Can you get into some specifics that you adopted? I'm listening to the pedagogy video I linked in another comment and so far my takeaway is that Harvard / Malan has a LOT of money to spend on video production, TAs, and the like. That's not easily replicable.

Sure. I really thought a lot of the early exercises were things that my students would enjoy doing, especially ISBN, Cash, and Caesar. I sent them to the CS50 web site and even showed them my own C solutions so that they could translate them. I am teaching a lot of students that have never programmed before, so one of my big takeaways is that they are not just learning Language X, they are learning lessons in programming that are applicable in many other languages.

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.

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

#72

Post by auxym »

randcraw wrote: post #46
AlexCoventry wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the institutional incentive to switch up the teacher of a module?

Usually it frees up the prior instructor to a) teach a more advanced course or one that's closer to their research interests rather than teach the same beginner level course over and over, or b) conduct research, which is why most tier 1 research uni profs took the job anyway. 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 t…

> Most major research uni profs are obliged to teach 2-3 courses per semester.

IME, that's a heavy courseload. At the university where I work (not as faculty), it's closer to 1 course per semester on average. Maybe 2 occasionally, but that leaves very little time for research.

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

#73

Post by jimhefferon »

CydeWeys wrote: post #60
jimhefferon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An awful lot of good teaching is interpersonal. There is a long history of didn't-work's in educational tech and often it is because the hard part is not the material, it is having students form the right mental models. That involves motivating them, adjusting the flow of information, and helping them as they go through a sequence of successive approximations. Basically, at least until now, it involves working with p…

Absolutely, and it would be great if teachers were able to fully dedicate themselves to optimizing the inter-personal aspects of it rather than also having to do all this other work of lecture/lesson planning, coming up with curricula, etc. We ask far too much of our teachers/professors, and realistically, most of them are not going to do remotely as good of a job as Dr. Malan has here on CS50. So if you're teaching…

> lecture/lesson planning, coming up with curricula, etc.

For most of an undergrad program, I personally find that adapting a good text to my students and our program's succession of courses to be about the same time and effort as adapting to good videos (I like 3B1B, for instance, although I have not adapted Dr Malan's material).

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

#75

Post by Arete314159 »

sukilot wrote: post #67
arcturus17 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are conflating the pre-Malan intense weedout "I survived CS50" CS50 with Malan's kinder gentler easier more superficial CS50. Malan's innovation was to change "Intro to CS" from "let's see who knew CS before they got here" to "Intro to CS"

Word. The 1990's CS50/CS51 course enrolled both students who'd gotten a "5" in the CS AP and students who didn't know what a for loop was. It felt like learning to swim while simultaneously drowning.

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

#76

Post by simonebrunozzi »

I think it might be useful to take a sneak peak at one of the past videos [0].

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.

[0]: https://youtu.be/jjqgP9dpD1k

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

#77

Post by bachmeier »

CydeWeys wrote: post #58
bachmeier wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Me too. I'm not saying that in general textbooks are better than lectures, I'm saying the lecture style of this class is sufficiently ineffective that I don't see how it's worth anyone's time to watch. In contrast, Martin Odersky's lectures are designed to effectivel…

> I'm saying the lecture style of this class is sufficiently ineffective that I don't see how it's worth anyone's time to watch. Again, you're incorrectly extrapolating from your minority view and making global statements about how it's not worth anyone else's time. This lecture style is very effective for most people and is absolutely worth their time. Witness how highly rated the class is, and how successful it is…

> and does a good job of accomplishing its goal of introducing people to the field

That's exactly the point. The goal is not to help students to learn the material at a deep level. It's to recruit students to CS. I'm not even sure what the disagreement is at this point, so I'm going to step away.

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

#78

Post by tomtheelder »

sukilot wrote: post #67
arcturus17 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are conflating the pre-Malan intense weedout "I survived CS50" CS50 with Malan's kinder gentler easier more superficial CS50. Malan's innovation was to change "Intro to CS" from "let's see who knew CS before they got here" to "Intro to CS"

Having watched a good number of people take the course, I think it's still extremely difficult for most students with no background in the subject. A number of classmates from other disciplines have told me that it was the hardest they took during undergrad.

It was definitely altered to be able to cater to a wider range of students, but that was mostly done with more approachable lectures and a _huge_ amount of support from the course staff rather than by simply making it easy.

If you already have a programming background then it is definitely very straightforward because, at the end of the day, it's an intro to programming course.

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

#79

Post by marianov »

nanna wrote: post #36

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…

I think states could produce such quality lessons, for free. The ROI of these would be enormous if proper internet access given to schools and households.

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

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

#80

Post by bachmeier »

auxym wrote: post #72
randcraw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually it frees up the prior instructor to a) teach a more advanced course or one that's closer to their research interests rather than teach the same beginner level course over and over, or b) conduct research, which is why most tier 1 research uni profs took the job anyway. 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 t…

> Most major research uni profs are obliged to teach 2-3 courses per semester. IME, that's a heavy courseload. At the university where I work (not as faculty), it's closer to 1 course per semester on average. Maybe 2 occasionally, but that leaves very little time for research.

Your profile says you're a mechanical engineer. At research universities, 1 course per semester is typical in engineering departments. That's definitely not the case across all departments.
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