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Malan truly is a fantastic lecturer, isn't he? He's also been leading the charge for free, online education—his course has been on MIT's OCW since 2007 [1]. Di

by benesch 14y ago

Malan truly is a fantastic lecturer, isn't he? He's also been leading the charge for free, online education—his course has been on MIT's OCW since 2007 [1]. Did you find that the lectures provided enough basis to complete the problem sets? A number of students I talked to struggled to actually piece together code after the presentation of mostly concepts in lecture. [1] http://cs50.tv http://cs50.tv

aruss 14y ago
I thought they were fine - I did watch some of the TAs virtual office hours on a couple of problem sets, but beyond that, the problem sets were largely good. I'm incredibly glad that the lectures were conceptually focused. It may have been a bit harder to do the assignments, but it forced you to really learn them. You had to go from concept to code on your own. In other classes (including CS75), it was much easier as you could copy a lot of work from lectures and office hours.
eriktrautman 14y ago
Malan's energy is awesome. For some of the more beastly problem sets in data structures and memory management, where Googling the error message just didn't cut it, I had to watch through all that week's available content (both lectures, both recitations, the walkthrough and the shorts) before gaining enough momentum to grind by. That's where it really hurt to not have another student sitting in the next seat to bounce ideas off of. They've put together a well monitored forum but it's not the same as walking someone through your code. I got it done, but some gray hairs could have been avoided. One of the major areas of improvement for all online ed is how to bring back that frictionless asking of questions. It's a comparative advantage for both people -- you may save me two hours of frustration with ten minutes of your time on a particular memory error and I may save you two hours of frustration in a similar fashion by better understanding pointers.

by benesch 14y ago

aruss 14y ago

I thought they were fine - I did watch some of the TAs virtual office hours on a couple of problem sets, but beyond that, the problem sets were largely good. I'm incredibly glad that the lectures were conceptually focused. It may have been a bit harder to do the assignments, but it forced you to really learn them. You had to go from concept to code on your own. In other classes (including CS75), it was much easier as you could copy a lot of work from lectures and office hours.

eriktrautman 14y ago

Malan's energy is awesome. For some of the more beastly problem sets in data structures and memory management, where Googling the error message just didn't cut it, I had to watch through all that week's available content (both lectures, both recitations, the walkthrough and the shorts) before gaining enough momentum to grind by. That's where it really hurt to not have another student sitting in the next seat to bounce ideas off of. They've put together a well monitored forum but it's not the same as walking someone through your code. I got it done, but some gray hairs could have been avoided. One of the major areas of improvement for all online ed is how to bring back that frictionless asking of questions. It's a comparative advantage for both people -- you may save me two hours of frustration with ten minutes of your time on a particular memory error and I may save you two hours of frustration in a similar fashion by better understanding pointers.