Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/how-harvards-star-computer-science-professor-built-a-distance-learning-empire

by alienreborn • 6 years ago

366 131 6 years ago

newyorker.com

ralmidani5• 6 years ago

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.

ralmidani5• 6 years ago

Also, FWIW, I completed MIT’s Intro to Programming with Python on edX before I took CS50, and recommend that learners get a decent grasp of programming principles with a higher-level language (spending a week with Scratch doesn’t really count) before diving into C with its pointers, manual memory management, etc.

arslnjmn• 6 years ago

I second this approach. Helped me get more out of CS50.

ghaff7• 6 years ago

Honestly, although in a self-paced MOOC format you can probably get away with it, the MIT 6.001 course really isn't the place to learn programming, programming environments, etc. for the first time either. It doesn't ostensibly require programming background, but it's at a far different pace and level than the actual "intro to programming" course I took way back when in college--and I had even had a programming course in high school which was fairly unusual at the time.

ADDED: I'm also not sure what to think about C in an intro course in this day and age. Sure, as a CS major, or even as part of a good programming curriculum, understanding some of what's going on under the covers is important. But that feels like a Level 2-ish topic at this point.

jcims• 6 years ago

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.

They know their audience.

criddell• 6 years ago

Ageist against whom? Gray hair isn't a problem image-wise if you are a professor nor is youth. I think the writer is just painting a picture.

ghaff7• 6 years ago

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.)

0d9eooo• 6 years ago

The harder story to tell that this piece is avoiding because of the difficulty is the institutional dynamics. It's hinted at in the article more or less directly, but the entire mindset at many places is so far from what's conveyed in this New Yorker piece that it sort of misses the ball completely.

At the time the story in this article begins, administrators at many places were completely unfamiliar with the general idea behind open content distribution. In such places, online systems for course content were seen as a way of locking down the intellectual property that courses represent, not to distribute it. Where I was at, faculty were explicitly admonished not to distribute any online course material because it was seen as leaking university IP. Course management systems were seen as a way to deliver materials online securely so as to ensure that they weren't widely distributed. Even if someone wanted to put the effort into something that might now be called a MOOC, it was doubly frowned upon because you were putting effort into teaching rather than research (especially if you were untenured), and triply so because you were putting effort into distributing courses online, which was a fringe activity.

By the time MOOCs came about and got a lot of press, and many of us were sort of shaking our heads at what seemed inevitable, it was a little too little too late. In online space, where social factors like reputation become amplified 100-fold, it's difficult to compete or add to the reputational weight of places like MIT or Harvard. Adding to this was the constant monetizing mindset, of trying to lock down materials, not recognizing the advertising/popularizing role that open content distribution enables. Then too was a sort of "so what" feeling, because in the absence of something like a pandemic, who really cares, from the perspective of the administration -- students come to campus and that's where the dollars come from; MOOCs and online course distribution of whatever form were seen as experimental, the realm of the extension service which is valued but only to a point.

There's lots of issues the piece doesn't get into, or only gets into in a half-hearted way, which is how these types of online teaching dynamics really mess with the traditional structures. So instead of having an interesting conversation about how unfamiliar it is for universities to be dealing with Course A at Institution 1 competing with Course B at Institution 2, it recapitulates the discussion in terms of Malan, which misses the bigger picture entirely. These issues are not about one instructor of one course at one university.

Maybe I'm just getting jaded, but I feel like this piece does a disservice to the behemoth of problems at universities represented by the online instructional debacle we've witnessed. Like lots of things, the pandemic is exposing widespread systemic problems, not creating them.

ghaff7• 6 years ago

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.

Dumblydorr• 6 years ago

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.

futevolei• 6 years ago

I don’t think the intention was to deliver a cheap shot, or at least I hope not. In many ways I liked MIT’s courses better but the contrast is clear. Ideally in the future everything will be online (at least partially) and students will be guided towards the style that serves them best. I have an in-person degree from a top public school with nearly 40k students and I also have an online cs degree from a mid level public school. I can do without the big lecture halls that have 300+ students. Just let me watch the video on my own schedule. I crave the small discussion sections where I can ask questions, draw on a board, hear other students questions etc...

melling• 6 years ago

“ Malan’s remote-teaching setup involves a host of technology, including a seven-foot-wide interactive computer screen, called a Microsoft Surface Hub”

Don’t hear much about the Surface Hub these days. It’s alive and well?

sukilot2• 6 years ago

$22K 4K touchscreen. It has a niche appeal.

vxNsr• 6 years ago

Yea, it’s something that’s bought by departments who are having a good year and don’t wanna lose their budget.

objclxt• 6 years ago

Don’t hear much about the Surface Hub these days. It’s alive and well?

Microsoft released an updated version - the Surface Hub 2S - about a year ago. The intention was this could be upgraded in-situ using a cartridge to become the Surface Hub 2X. The 2X was meant to have all the hotness Microsoft were showing off in demos at the time (it has now been cancelled - [1]).

I procured one for some R&D, it's only sold through OEMs and service providers, for around $10k (more if you get the steelcase stand and battery pack).

For what it is it's quite good: it's industrial design and feature-set goes well beyond a lot of the competition (Google Jamboard, etc), although its applications are still quite niche.

One nice feature is you can output the touch input to a connected Windows laptop, making it a (rather expensive) huge multi-touch external monitor.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21119915/microsoft-surface...

noelwelsh2• 6 years ago

Kinda fluffy article. This talk on the pedagogy of CS50 has more content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVjepjUTAk4

cjf4• 6 years ago

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.

sseagull2• 6 years ago

One thing to keep in mind is that (according to the article) he took over the course in 2007.

I have been interested in pedagogy and talking with all the great teachers, the one thing I see in common is the ability to update, improve, and iterate. Constantly. Pretty much every time the course is taught there is something slightly different. There is risk there (sometimes changes are harmful) but that is how you make the course better.

My guess is that is the case here, and that the course 13 years ago was not nearly as refined. But he had a vision and stuck with it.

bachmeier6• 6 years ago

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.

arcturus17• 6 years ago

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.

CydeWeys5• 6 years ago

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.

phaus• 6 years ago

When I took the course as a near-beginner (someone who had taken programming 101 classes before but struggled to make anything useful), I found that jumping between languages frequently was more frustrating than helpful. Ultimately I moved on to something else. CS50 had high production values but I didn't find it superior in any other way. None of the content is bad, but I didn't get the feeling that many seem to have that its the greatest intro to CS.

Definitely didn't seem super beginner friendly after the first week or so. Perhaps I'm too slow at picking this stuff up.

superhuzza• 6 years ago

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 learned basic programming by doing CS50x. The purpose of the lectures is to introduce the concepts in an engaging way, and spark interest in doing it yourself. Then the learning happens in the weekly assignments, where you have to actually implement the ideas and get your code past the automated testing. I'd say the assignments are 3/4 of the course.

It's a very nice introduction to programming for someone who hasn't done any before. And in the end that's what it is - an introduction, not a deep dive.

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

That's why it's called an intro course: it covers a lot but none of it too deep. From what I understand the course is taken not by those who've been doing programming since childhood but also by those in almost completely unrelated fields. There's plenty of courses that can be taken later that go very deep.

erikbye• 6 years ago

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

There are supplemental textbooks listed for the course:

https://cs50.harvard.edu/college/2020/spring/syllabus/#books

Also, confused why you expect depth from something with "intro" in its title.

cpursley• 6 years ago

Do you mind sharing the name or url to these MOOCs?

kyawzazaw6• 6 years ago

there is also lecture notes made already

more often that not, as a CS student for most core cs classes, i have barely written any notes.

zholito2• 6 years ago

You are probably an exception: self motivated individual. The rest of us, which I assume is a big majority: prefer video over text, are more engaged by visual interactions, and still found big parts of this material hard to grasp, not to mention the preference for the free availability of the material.

bobochan2• 6 years ago

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 made this content available.

noelwelsh2• 6 years ago

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.

bobochan2• 6 years ago

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.

ru552• 6 years ago

Malan is an excellent teacher and I absolutely enjoyed the time I spent with the CS50 material.

RikNieu• 6 years ago

I owe my career to Malan and his CS50 course. That's how I learned to code. I wish him only the best.

vcsilva• 6 years ago

CS50 is a really well-crafted course, and Malan is an amazing educator. Taking this class online is one of the reasons that got me interested in CS and programming.

I think that this course in particular really highlights the impact of a good teacher. In college I've had multiple professors who quickly made my dislike subjects that otherwise I would have really liked.

Separo• 6 years ago

I took CS50 in 2013. Malan was a phenomenal teacher and presented complex concepts with a pace and clarity that made them easy.

jcq3• 6 years ago

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?

valuearb2• 6 years ago

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.

ashtonbaker• 6 years ago

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

ghaff7• 6 years ago

Not necessarily (although it often is, possibly because it's the rockstars who can afford the time and have the interest to play around with the MOOC thing).

Early on with MOOCs, there was a Harvard literature course I was very excited about taking on Greek myth or something like that. I think I made it through about the first half of the first lecture. The whole thing felt incredibly pretentious and generally awful. (And, yes, I have taken literature courses at good colleges that were much more interesting.)

nanna• 6 years ago

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.

AlexCoventry• 6 years ago

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

randcraw• 6 years ago

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 those who love to teach revel in intro courses, and from what I've seen, that's less than 10% of profs at big name research-driven schools.

swyx• 6 years ago

well said. Prof Malan has achieved a great deal, for sure, but he does have that rockstar air to him which usually turns out badly when/if the press someday turns on him.

also i guess worth pointing out that it's win-win for Harvard to be giving this kind of support, with the attendant marketing it drives and the implication that if you take this class you can be the next Zuck.

bmitc2• 6 years ago

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 calmer environment and a lecturer that seems like I could have a relaxed conversation with. The course feels like it's selling me something.

I also don't understand why the course seems to cover everything and the kitchen sink. It covers a rather wide swath of material and programming languages. It's my personal learning and teaching style that courses should be more focused and concise. The course content also seems very trendy and software engineering job-oriented, and I think learning should be removed from trends. 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.

Are MLs (SML, Ocaml, F#) or Lisps/Schemes mentioned at all in this course? I don't even see the point in teaching C as an intro language anymore. Python as well, which has nothing going for it as a language aside from library support and industry use.

I'd be interested in how both students and other professors at Harvard feel about the course's success given their experience in courses that follow.

Duller-Finite• 6 years ago

Yes, this was noted in the article, which certainly does not proclaim that the CS50 model is the one that all universities and courses should be adopting.

"Malan’s contract at Harvard allows him to focus almost exclusively on CS50; even the research he publishes centers mainly on the class...Malan’s method of remote teaching is not easily replicable; CS50’s pyrotechnics would not be possible without an unusually deep well of resources and his own fanatical commitment"

marianov• 6 years ago

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

Avicebron2• 6 years ago

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.

bakuninsbart• 6 years ago

I'm studying CS in Germany at a relatively prestigious institution, and I've gotta say that this online semester has been by far my most productive. Usually I have big problems juggling work, personal life (in 3 different countries) and university education, with everything moving online this has been far easier. Cutting out a 2 hour daily commute has given me a substantial amount of freetime, and the ability to rewatch lectures, pause them, make a coffee in between etc. has given me a much deeper understanding of the topics covered this summer.

An online university would have probably been a better fit for me in the first place, but at the time I didn't want to do it due to the reduced prestige associated with it.

colinmhayes2• 6 years ago

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 department had a similar system for the calculus courses except they modeled the schedule around MIT's and just posted the MIT lectures that corresponded to each class.

bsder5• 6 years ago

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.

akman2• 6 years ago

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

_jwilde• 6 years ago

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...

unishark• 6 years ago

Malan is a "Professor of the Practice". That means teaching only. There may be some kind of job security for such teaching roles, but it's not a tenured nor tenure-track title. Usually just a fixed contract you have to repeatedly renew like visiting professor (but possibly with less degree requirements).

notadonut• 6 years ago

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.

NineStarPoint2• 6 years ago

You’re too used to privlage being used as a pejorative I think. It’s highly relevant that if a school admin wanted to use Malan’s work as an example to base some classes off of, that they can’t just throw a teacher at their normal course load and expect anything close to that level of work. I know many teachers in the public school system who’s admins don’t seem to realize how difficult a good online syllabus is to put together, and those administrators could do to be reminded that you need to put a lot of resources behind someone if you want quality work from them.

It’s not a bad thing that Malan has the privilege to be in a position where he can successfully focus on perfecting a single class. In fact it’s fantastic for us all that he’s doing this work. It’s just important to acknowledge the privileges he has so we don’t look at normal teachers and say “if you only tried a bit harder, couldn’t you do something like this?” It’s not just about effort and intelligence, it’s also about the resources that are put behind the educator.

CydeWeys5• 6 years ago

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.

jimhefferon2• 6 years ago

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 people.

Of course, things can change and this course is certainly very admirable. It will be interesting to see where it goes.

CydeWeys5• 6 years ago

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 an intro CS class, use his materials rather than coming up with your own! Same for any other subject; we just need all these ideal materials to be available for every imaginable class targeting every possible age level (elementary on up). Admittedly it's a big a lift, but a seemingly necessary one.

And yes, I know a lot of this already exists to some extent, but where it gets lost is in its availability, centralization, and being targeted at teachers only rather than also being available to the students.

joshocar3• 6 years ago

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.

jackpirate• 6 years ago

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.

loco5niner• 6 years ago

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"

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

Take aside the crew that does all the filming and editing and the fact that they can have guests like Zuckerberg or Ballmer,and you have a passionate tutor,who is willing to go extra mile. When I was at school, I only had 2 teachers like this- won't forget them for my entire life. At uni, most were so so( as the whole uni itsel) and often more interested in anything but teaching. However, briefly,we had an ex HSBC guy,who was the finance professor. The guy was funny, captivating and knew his shit inside out. When asked why he left banking,he did say he was finding academia more interesting. And he was a perfect fit. A lot of people are good at doing research but they may not be very good teachers,or not at least in the setting most of us are familiar with( large audiences,one guy delivering knowledge). I had a chance to watch som recorded lectures from MIT, Harvard,and some other famous institutions and the quality of teaching some( not all though) manage to deliver is exceptional.

programmertote• 6 years ago

Agree. I have taken classes with over 40+ professors (close to 50, but I have also taken two or three classes with some profs) in my undergrad and grad school. Out of them, I can recall ~5 being pretty good instructors. Being a professor does not guarantee one is a good teacher/instructor.

The thing that sets apart good instructors from mediocre ones is the passion they have toward teaching (esp. the good ones seem to have empathy as in they want students to succeed and understand the materials that the instructors themselves probably took a good amount of time digesting when they were in students' shoes).

mettamage• 6 years ago

Can confirm this. I taught for a bit (coding bootcamp, 1 year). I was super excited my first 3 months (it normalized after that) and during the whole year I had a lot of empathy in the sense that I felt their pain. It’s easy to feel someone’s pain when you yourself felt it a great deal as well back then.

I was at my best during those first months. Experience and empathy all help but I could notice how being only slightly enthusiastic was hindering my performance.

mathattack• 6 years ago

I took the class. What didn’t scale were the TAs. It took 2 months to get anything graded. Malan’s response was “The TA will grade it within a week.”

I suspect they’ve automated since.

zaphod4prez• 6 years ago

Yep, grading is fully automated now!

tijuco2• 6 years ago

"you don't need to attend Harvard" says the guy who attended Harvard. It sounds like a guy from a rich family who after failing some business, finally succeeded and then says: "if you fail, try again, don't give up". They just forgot that most people can't fail. That's a stupid advice

paulcarroty• 6 years ago

I've ended Harvard CS50 course and should say he's definitely one of the best, rockstar-like. Also seen tons of MIT, Berkeley and another courses from Coursera & Edx, so maybe can do the basic comparison.

Secret maybe in very good covering of complex stuff and teaching style: pressure, fast moving between topics, playing with auditory in tv-show format, and nearly screaming to get attention while needed.

seddin• 6 years ago

David Malan is such a nice person, I remember when I was taking CS50 and found a syntax error and emailed him about it and he was so kind and fixed it.

compscistd• 6 years ago

I met Professor Malan once and asked him for some advice on overcoming imposter syndrome. His advice was a matter-of-fact, learn the things you feel like you don't know and it shouldn't be an issue. I still feel like that sometimes, but the way MOOCs are today makes it easier to approach anything I feel like I don't know.

Arete3141592• 6 years ago

Sad to see the article did not mention the OG 1990's CS50 rockstar, Margo Seltzer.

simonebrunozzi• 6 years ago

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

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/1owAX

eointierney• 6 years ago

The New Yorker needs editors

More of less

f0rgot• 6 years ago

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

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