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Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

newyorker.com

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

#111

Post by kyawzazaw »

bachmeier wrote: post #77
CydeWeys wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

but you were pointing out its flaws in achieving a different objective ("learning deeply")

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

#112

Post by haditab »

bsder wrote: post #101
colinmhayes wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just graduated from a top ten computer science program in the world. The department recorded all the lectures. By the time you got to the upper level classes completely booked 200+ person lecture halls would have less than 50 students show up because everyone watched online. The recording system allowed you to watch at 1.5 or 2x speed and skip to the next slide when someone asked a stupid question. The math departm…

> By the time you got to the upper level classes completely booked 200+ person lecture halls would have less than 50 students show up because everyone watched online. I don't know whether to blame the professor or the students here--my gut feel is to blame the professor. I taught at a far less "prestigious" university and that wasn't my experience. I used to record all my CS lectures and practically all my students s…

Why is there a need to blame anyone? The goal is for students to learn, not that they show up in class out of duty. If they found a more efficient way to learn from the class that involves not showing up in person, I think they should be encouraged to do it.

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

#113

Post by kyawzazaw »

Reelin wrote: post #109
kyawzazaw wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought MIT mostly only opens access to old recorded videos.

Higher level math continues to advance but calculus itself doesn't change much. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus )

My comment was more relating to how their schedule (in timing relative to MIT) will be affected, assuming they were trying to use newly made videos.

Probably not the case and they just structure their own course to be similar to MIT's courses.

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

#114

Post by colinmhayes »

bsder wrote: post #101
colinmhayes wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just graduated from a top ten computer science program in the world. The department recorded all the lectures. By the time you got to the upper level classes completely booked 200+ person lecture halls would have less than 50 students show up because everyone watched online. The recording system allowed you to watch at 1.5 or 2x speed and skip to the next slide when someone asked a stupid question. The math departm…

> By the time you got to the upper level classes completely booked 200+ person lecture halls would have less than 50 students show up because everyone watched online. I don't know whether to blame the professor or the students here--my gut feel is to blame the professor. I taught at a far less "prestigious" university and that wasn't my experience. I used to record all my CS lectures and practically all my students s…

Everyone went to discussions, and office hours were effectively mandatory, so there was still plenty of staff interaction. In the end I don't feel like I miss much by watching lectures online. I honestly believe asking questions during lecture is extremely disrespectful bordering on immoral when there are more than 100 people listening, so why show up?

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

#115

Post by bsder »

colinmhayes wrote: post #114
bsder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the time you got to the upper level classes completely booked 200+ person lecture halls would have less than 50 students show up because everyone watched online. I don't know whether to blame the professor or the students here--my gut feel is to blame the professor. I taught at a far less "prestigious" university and that wasn't my experience. I used to record all my CS lectures and practically all my students s…

Everyone went to discussions, and office hours were effectively mandatory, so there was still plenty of staff interaction. In the end I don't feel like I miss much by watching lectures online. I honestly believe asking questions during lecture is extremely disrespectful bordering on immoral when there are more than 100 people listening, so why show up?

> Everyone went to discussions, and office hours were effectively mandatory, so there was still plenty of staff interaction. In the end I don't feel like I miss much by watching lectures online.

Okay, that's a LOT of missing context.

Having a "discussion" section is unusual for most universities outside of beginner prerequisite classes. And, office hours have never been mandatory for students anywhere I have taught.

Given that, yeah, I can see that interrupting a lecturer is problematic and that watching a recording is probably okay.

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

#116

Post by _jwilde »

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…

Yep.

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...

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

#117

Post by bsder »

haditab wrote: post #112
bsder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the time you got to the upper level classes completely booked 200+ person lecture halls would have less than 50 students show up because everyone watched online. I don't know whether to blame the professor or the students here--my gut feel is to blame the professor. I taught at a far less "prestigious" university and that wasn't my experience. I used to record all my CS lectures and practically all my students s…

Why is there a need to blame anyone? The goal is for students to learn, not that they show up in class out of duty. If they found a more efficient way to learn from the class that involves not showing up in person, I think they should be encouraged to do it.

I have a fundamental belief that delivering a lecture is an active experience. I use and gauge student reactions to questions or comments to tell how well a class is receiving the information I am presenting. I also use it to pinpoint possible weaknesses of the class (did they miss the point of a prerequisite class, for example).

If I am not doing that, what's the point of a "lecture"?

Otherwise, you might as well read a book. It's faster than a lecture, likely more thorough, and not tied to a specific timeslice.

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

#118

Post by akman »

bsder wrote: post #99
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 $50…

This begs to normalized and sold as a package for both providers and consumers.

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

#119

Post by bmitc »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #108
bmitc wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be the odd one out because I couldn't jive with the course's presentation style when I tried to take it to see what the hype was all about. It felt like Joel Osteen was trying to teach me computer science. I don't mean to be flippant and don't read too much into that comment (it's just what came to mind), but it's just that the slicked up, overly produced style just turns me off from learning. I much prefer a…

there are additional sections where they broke off into smaller groups. It is selling you into the world of computer science, a window into it. This could be further seen by its spin-off courses for different audiences. > 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. It's an "intro" course.…

> It is selling you into the world of computer science

I personally don't like being sold something when learning and feel like there's a fine line between something being sold and something being presented as important or interesting. I acknowledge this is a strong personal preference.

> It's an "intro" course. In fact, this intro course covers way more than what colleges in the US do for an intro course.

Well, that's part of my problem with it. If it's an intro course, why throw so much into it? If it's meant to survey a lot of things, then why not provide a wider view? Having not taken the course, I am speculating here, but I would guess there's two outcomes to a student taking the course. They either get a superficial view of what they cover or things are covered at such a pace by going both deep and wide that there isn't time to properly ingest everything. That's why I am curious of hearing about actual outcomes from people taking the course. Courses that cover too much, for me, get me thinking in too many directions to be useful.

> Nope, and why should they be?

I was just asking the question, not saying they should be. But I do feel it's a bit of a disservice not mentioning them given that they inspired a wide swath of today's modern programming features. I also feel they are the ideal teaching languages, especially for intro courses.

> David Malan answers this here: https://qr.ae/pNsCkQ

I'm fairly unconvinced by that answer, which is rather predictable. Why is it important it's close to hardware? There's nothing stopping you from implementing data structures or exploring buffer overflows in other languages. Mathematicians don't start teaching students mathematics by being "close to the hardware". If they did, we'd start off the university education with real analysis, topology, and abstract algebra. Instead, calculus is the primary starting point, which sits at the right level of abstraction. C is exactly at the wrong level of abstraction. It's too far away from the hardware to really understand the hardware software interaction in depth, and it's too low-level to understand the more useful abstractions in computer science and programming. I personally view abstraction as the key point in learning programming and computer science, and C is probably the worst language you could pick for that.

The approach found in Nand2Tetris and the book The Elements of Computing Systems is far more interesting if one wants to truly understand how software stacks on top of software that stacks on top of hardware.

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

#120

Post by notadonut »

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…

Why are we doing these "privilege" callouts? What does this add to the discussion? Should Malan apologize? Should the New Yorker apologize for him? Individuals are regularly used metonymically to represent a larger system. And those systems need a "face", because without it we don't care about the story.
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