CS50 is THE reason I have a software development career today. Coincidentally, after CS50, I started watching an MIT Python course. If the MIT course had been my introduction so programming, I am sure that I would have dismissed software development as "not for me". I got lucky that my first exposure was CS50 - I owe a debt of gratitude to Malan.
Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire
131–136 of 136 posts
Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My guess is that most politicians don't come from STEM backgrounds, mostly law or public policy so they don't see the inherit value in it.
Coupled with the American war on intellectualism and a capturing of the state by corporations, and higher education bloated with administrators, there are sufficient blockers that a coordinated state level AAA online higher education system will be pretty hard to achieve.
The closest possibility is that the California state school system develops an online wing.
Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
This begs to normalized and sold as a package for both providers and consumers.
The problem is that this effectively requires that you set up all the equipment in a place and make people come to that. Not a great thing in the middle of Covid. However, once Covid passes, perhaps WeWork should try this with all their real estate to avoid going bankrupt.
That's an interesting idea with WeWork.
I'd think that despite variations in environments in a home, there are either 1) enough accommodating tools to normalize (e.g., lights that have a variety of settings) or 2) the majority of the processes required to handle the variations are figured out (e.g., in consistently poor lighting, you need package B instead of package A).
I see some hardware packages for home studios going on sale, but nothing to the level of hardware/software integration necessary for the most effective online instruction/discussion.
Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire
#134> 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…
It must make someone money... (publishers, resellers, book stores, etc.) Someone else made a killing buying books at the end of the semester.
"You paid $130? Best I can do is 5 bucks"
Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The even sillier split-audience course in the mid 2000s was CS121, the intro CS theory course. More or less a math course, but required for CS students, the audience included a mix of advanced math students (including e.g. some IMO winners) and programmers without any math background. The result was that half the class felt it was incredibly easy and slow-paced (at least for the first month; later the problems got te…
As referenced in sibling comment, I took 121 a bit earlier than that, with Prof. Lewis. Of course he taught from his "Turing's Face" textbook, which is widely touted as accessible to students with high school math. By the time I took 121 I had quite a bit more math than that so I can't recall whether that is true. I agree with your "tedious and fiddly" assessment, but I don't see any way around it. CS is a tedious and fiddly subject anyway, but the fiddly tedium in this case is related to foundational truths about computation rather than trivial details of particular algorithms (...or, at less ambitious schools, APIs). Frankly, I hope it's never the case that a student could graduate Harvard with a degree in CS (or applied math) without mastering the material that Prof. Lewis taught in CS-121.
Re: Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Arguably, this course does both of selling and presenting the importance of computer science in today's world. I think before you add more speculation, it would be best if you at least look at the syllabus and content.
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I am not sure how familiar you are with university intro-level course. This course actually providers a wider viewer than many many other intro courses.
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> I also feel they are the ideal teaching languages, especially for intro courses.
Not sure how involved you are with designing a CS curriculum but at least in the US, most colleges shy away from these languages. (Yale does start in Racket) I'd make an assumption that over all this time period, a lot of these professors have actually put some thought into which language is suitable.
--- There's nothing stopping but since this course is giving you a window into the world of computer science, they wanted to add the hardware/memory-mangament aspect as well. I'd say this is quite unnecessary for an intro-cs course, but not a bad thing. Assuming this purpose, I can't think of another language that would be more suitable than C. Assembly? That'd be painful and unhelpful.
I think your analogy is a false equivalency, regarding topology and abstract algebra. I don't know about math enough to give my vision of a better analogy.
I'd saying teaching kids to drive in manual shift instead of auto would be a better equivalency to having them write in C.
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The course you are mentioning is for a very specific purpose. Even the author says that the students for this course should be able to program in some programming language. (Which wouldn't work for an intro course where they target someone with no exposure at all).
And most CS programs would have a similar course at 200-level. See examples of CMU's 15-213, MIT's 6.004, Stanford's C107.