
Harvard CS professor David Malan built a distance-learning empire - alienreborn
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/how-harvards-star-computer-science-professor-built-a-distance-learning-empire
======
nanna
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.

~~~
bsder
> 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.

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

~~~
bsder
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.

~~~
akman
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.

------
cosmodisk
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
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
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.

------
cjf4
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.

~~~
bachmeier
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
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.

~~~
sukilot
You are conflating the pre-Malan intense weedout "I survived CS50" CS50 with
Malan's kinder gentler easier more superficial CS50.

Malan's innovation was to change "Intro to CS" from "let's see who knew CS
before they got here" to "Intro to CS"

~~~
Arete314159
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.

~~~
jacobolus
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 tedious and fiddly for
everyone), and the other half was completely overwhelmed.

~~~
jessaustin
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.

------
CydeWeys
> 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.

~~~
jimhefferon
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.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
sseagull
In theory, yes. However teachers need to adapt materials to their own style of
teaching and to their audience. It can be very hard in practice to teach
someone else's materials and have it be 'good' and engaging.

Think of it like cover bands. They don't play it exactly the way the original
band does - they adapt it to their own style. So while the original work is
'done', there is still a lot more work to do.

------
bobochan
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.

~~~
noelwelsh
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.

~~~
bobochan
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.

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

------
tijuco2
"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

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

------
melling
“ 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?

~~~
objclxt
> 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...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21119915/microsoft-surface-
hub-2x-cancel-major-software-update-features-release-date)

------
simonebrunozzi
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](https://youtu.be/jjqgP9dpD1k)

------
vcsilva
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.

------
ru552
Malan is an excellent teacher and I absolutely enjoyed the time I spent with
the CS50 material.

------
paulcarroty
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.

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

------
compscistd
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.

------
neonate
[https://archive.is/1owAX](https://archive.is/1owAX)

------
ralmidani
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.

~~~
ralmidani
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.

~~~
ghaff
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.

~~~
ralmidani
You’re actually right, I had also taken very basic “intro” courses locally
before taking the MIT course, and Grimson was the first person to explain Big
O to me. Having already done some Python and C++ probably helped get more out
of that course, as well.

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.

~~~
ghaff
I really liked 6.001 but I already have a fair bit of programming experience
although I don't do it professionally and am not a CS major--so I got a lot
out of it. MIT has a doubtless deserved reputation as being a bit of a
firehose but even so, I can't imagine showing up on campus (during normal
times) and learning the basics of programming including even the basics of
using a command line on the side while taking not only 6.001 but an otherwise
full course load.

Charles Severance's Intro course from U Michigan is a nice Intro to Python
MOOC course that's geared to genuine beginners.

~~~
ralmidani
Thanks for recommending the Michigan course! I have mentored/tutored in the
past but am currently too busy. If people contact me regarding lessons, I can
politely redirect them to that course.

------
Arete314159
Sad to see the article did not mention the OG 1990's CS50 rockstar, Margo
Seltzer.

------
jcq3
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?

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

~~~
valuearb
I would like to find it too. I just related this story to my wife and she
doesn’t remember watching it. I said “you were enraptured, and watched the
whole thing?”!

“Apparently it wasn’t that memorable“, she replied.

Edit: Might be this one?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_KghQP86Sw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_KghQP86Sw)

If so he’s updated it since we watched.

------
seddin
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.

------
f0rgot
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.

------
mathattack
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
Yep, grading is fully automated now!

------
eointierney
The New Yorker needs editors

More of less

