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> 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
by CydeWeys 6y 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.
- jimhefferon 6y agoAn 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 6y agoAbsolutely, 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 6y agoIn 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.
- jimhefferon 6y ago> lecture/lesson planning, coming up with curricula, etc. For most of an undergrad program, I personally find that adapting a good text to my students and our program's succession of courses to be about the same time and effort as adapting to good videos (I like 3B1B, for instance, although I have not adapted Dr Malan's material).
- joshocar 6y agoThe 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 6y agomath 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 6y agoIt 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"