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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

#91

Post by MiroF »

tomtheelder wrote: post #78
sukilot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppo…

> 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.

It's hardly a "challenging course" by department standards, but perhaps to a broader audience. 161, 224, and even 124, 61 are much harder.

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

#92

Post by MiroF »

Arete314159 wrote: post #75
sukilot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is still the case... most CS concentrators enroll in 50, of vastly different background.

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

#93

Post by jackpirate »

CydeWeys wrote: post #38

> 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 int…

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

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.

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

#94

Post by Avicebron »

MiroF wrote: post #90
Avicebron wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was a huge push into Khan academy, but for more advanced topics e.g. graduate level with clear course structure. 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.

This seems so obviously important to me and yet there is pretty much no will to do it in the government.

Yeah...I really don't understand the government's deliberate strangulation of research and positive advancement. Part of the prosperity of the 20th century was driven by a flood of funding into technological innovations of multiple fronts. It's a shame it took a war to bring it on, but it was so obviously beneficial it looks stupid not to acknowledge it.

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

#95

Post by joshocar »

bachmeier wrote: post #80
auxym wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm also an ME, but I have a masters degree in Marine Science. The professors in my graduate program usually only taught one class a semester, some only one a year. From my experience it very much depends on the university. Some schools are much more focuses on teaching and others on research.

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

#96

Post by aspaviento »

bachmeier wrote: post #82
aspaviento wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Passive consumption of an entertaining lecture doesn't help much. I wholeheartedly disagree. It's said on a video linked in another comment, students can learn by associating the emotions they are experiencing with the content they are receiving. Specially if his classes are that outstanding.

This research, out of Harvard, disagrees: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t... That's certainly not the only evidence that passive lecturing isn't particularly effective: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/lectures-arent-just-... It's not hard to find other papers showing the same thing.

You misunderstood me, I never said passive lecturing was better than active, what I said is that it is useful (as opposed to your "doesn't help much") and as an "entertaining lecture" (quoting you again), not as a boring one as the second article states. Clearly an active one has more chances of sticking with you but don't you remember any particular scene in a show that for whatever reason you can't never forget?

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

#97

Post by joshocar »

bachmeier wrote: post #82
aspaviento wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Passive consumption of an entertaining lecture doesn't help much. I wholeheartedly disagree. It's said on a video linked in another comment, students can learn by associating the emotions they are experiencing with the content they are receiving. Specially if his classes are that outstanding.

This research, out of Harvard, disagrees: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t... That's certainly not the only evidence that passive lecturing isn't particularly effective: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/lectures-arent-just-... It's not hard to find other papers showing the same thing.

Passive lecturing is awful in general, but I'm not sure what the alternative is. At least with an online course you can pause, rewind, rewatch. With an in person lecture you are at the mercy of your note taking ability and the book. MOOCs were just becoming a thing when I was in graduate school and I really think my undergraduate experience would have been much better if they had existed then.

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

#98

Post by joshocar »

jimhefferon wrote: post #54
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

> 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 int…

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…

The problem is that professors have absolutely no incentive to create good courses. All of their incentives are in their research so time spent on class prep is time lost working on the things that are actually incentivized; doing research, writing papers and applying for grants.

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

#99

Post by bsder »

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…

> Having an entire production team at the ready?

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.

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

#100

Post by valuearb »

ashtonbaker wrote: post #53
valuearb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife watched his class on the architecture of the internet. She’s not technical at all but was absorbed by it to the end. And I never told her it was from Harvard.

Which course is this? I feel like I've seen it but I'm not able to find it with an internet search.

I would like to find it too. I just related this story to my wife and she doesn’t remember watching it. I said “you were enraptured, and watched the whole thing?”!

“Apparently it wasn’t that memorable“, she replied.

Edit: Might be this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_KghQP86Sw

If so he’s updated it since we watched.

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