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.
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.
But some people can’t drop thousands or even hundreds of dollars to have a prof or TA hold their hand as they learn programming essentials. They might have to put in more time on their own to do well in a course like 6.001, but that may be their only option. They could do Udemy courses, but the quality there seems to vary quite a bit (whereas with edX there’s some built-in vetting), and a complete beginner may be overwhelmed by the number of choices.
Charles Severance's Intro course from U Michigan is a nice Intro to Python MOOC course that's geared to genuine beginners.
Also, a decent chunk of the content in the magazine is actual fiction by actual accomplished fiction writers (not "failed" ones). You don't tend to see it linked from HN obviously, but that's very much the vibe they're going for. Think of it as part commentary on the times and part literary fiction magazine. That may not be your cup of tea but it is appealing to lots of people.
FWIW, my wife also found Prof. Grimson to be “too monotone” and asked me “how do you stay awake during those lectures?” but without bringing age into it.
Side rant: I am the child of baby boomers, and I think their generation had it much easier than we do. I also get infuriated with the callousness and lack of empathy exhibited by many people from the Boomer generation. But rude retorts like “OK Boomer”, aside from being disrespectful, only encourage further callousness and lack of empathy.
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.
There are also still quite a few MIT courses that have course websites/YouTube channels with videos but are not linked to on OCW nor adapted for edX. At least I've taken 3 such courses in the last couple years. So I don't think they are being strict about distribution either.
MIT President Charles Vest said that “We are not providing an MIT education on the Web. We are providing our core materials that are the infrastructure that undergirds an MIT education. Real education requires interaction, the interaction that is part of American teaching. We think that OpenCourseWare will make it possible for faculty here and elsewhere to concentrate even more on the actual process of teaching, on the interactions between faculty and students that are the real core of learning.”
ADDED: Video was not nearly as democratized at the time. YouTube wasn't founded until 2005.
Honestly I really like the idea of using OCW materials to run a course, I'd have loved something like that instead of the AP program in high school. It's too bad the original intended use didn't catch on (or at least I've never seen it used that way).