4 ms·

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 m

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 6y 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.
- sseagull 6y ago
  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.
- 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 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.

CydeWeys 6y 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.

sseagull 6y ago
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.
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 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.