Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire

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.

"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"

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

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.

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.

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...

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

They know their audience.

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.

And I never told her it was from Harvard.

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.)