The Future of EdTech: interview with Harvard Professor David Malan

Prof. David J. Malan is one of those people. You know, one of those modern Renaissance inspiring leaders with multiple academic achievements, remarkable professional experiences and, most important, with a strong will to have a real impact on the future of our society. Malan’s deep expertise in Cybersecurity allowed him to serve as a Chief Information Officer for Mindset Media first, then as a Computer Science Professor for Harvard University.

In fact, despite his many achievements, Malan’s crowning jewel is definitely his very atypical Harvard course: CS50, which aims to make the mysterious world of programming and the anatomy of our everyday tech companions more accessible to everybody. CS50 (Computer Science 50) is an online 12 week introductory course for aspiring programmers, software engineers and anyone interested in the inner workings of their machines. It belongs to the beautiful realm of OpenCourseware, college-grade courses published for free via the Internet.

Malan encourages both Harvard majors in computer science and anyone interested in the subject to follow the online course. I was delighted of having the opportunity to talk to him and see what he had to say about this wonderful initiative and about the future of Education, from an edTech perspective.

Here are his thoughts:

First of all, allow me to say I greatly appreciate your work and have been following CS50’s progress for a while now. I was wondering: In general terms, why do you think it is important for students to study Computer Science?

I think better understanding of the increasingly technological world around us today is compelling, particularly given how omnipresent computers now are — in people’s pockets, on people’s desks and laptops. But I also think more fundamental to computer science is the acquisition of a capability to better solve problems and to think more methodically about problems both in and outside of computer science. I would say that computer science helps you crystallize and clarify your thoughts when it comes to solving some problems logically. And I think that, then, is the longest term return on something like a computer science course.

So you would recommend studying at least the basics of computers science not only for those students who want to become a software engineer but that it might be a useful course for any kind of professional profile?

Absolutely! It helps you organize your thoughts more clearly, and I think that has lifelong returns, irrespective of whether you remain in engineering.

Going back to CS50 — how did you manage to engage so much with your students? On social media you have almost 30'000 followers between Facebook and Twitter, and over 55'000 CS50 Facebookgroup members. What’s the recipe for your success?

That’s a good question. I’d like to think first and foremost we do a good job at teaching computer science, but more than that I’d like to think we’ve done what we can to create a true experience for students, that’s quite unlike most other academic experiences they might have had, and to create a culture around the class that makes a student genuinely willing to put in the requisite effort and time that’s necessary to truly master, or truly wrap one’s mind around a very unfamiliar field, and to create for students an opportunity to have this very shared, collective experience with classmates that might exact quite a bit of time and effort out of them, but an experience that we hope they will look back on some months later, very pleased that they took the course and very proud of themselves. Even if they might not want to go through it again, [I hope] they will have felt that there were significantly high returns on their time and effort.

There is an active discussion about this in academic circles at the moment. What exactly does student engagement mean to you?

We want students to want to be putting time into the course. We want to pique their curiosity and get them excited about the field, but we also want to wet their appetite and incentivize them in some way to put in the time and go beyond mere minimal expectations, and to do that, again, we have aspired to create this cultural experience that they want to be part of; so we can demand quite a bit of them, but in return we hope they can have as much fun as there is work in the class. The cliché I usually cite is “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” from Mary Poppins, for instance. [this is] also the notion of meeting students halfway, whereby so long as they put in the effort, it will be more than just an academic experience for them but also this shared social experience.

(a typical CS50 lesson)

Speaking of social media. Do you think social media really work toward student engagement, and help in furthering discussion? Do you see them as a viable tool for education?

Absolutely! For our students who are primarily taking the course online, well beyond Cambridge, absolutely! The Facebook group in particular has proved a fascinating phenomenon for us, whereby the first year we offered CS50x through EDx in 2012, quite a few Facebook groups arose organically because students of different languages and in different countries started their own local groups. So in the second version of CS50 a year later, we decided to embrace that aspect of the course and actually make it official. We deprecated the course’s own official discussion software and replaced it with tools and places that students were already spending time in- specifically Facebook and Twitter, Reddit, more recently Stack Exchange and most recently Slack- the chat service, to lower the transaction distance between a student and his or her classmates. It’s all the easier to engage with classmates if you are in a tool or in a place- virtual or otherwise- that simply makes it easy to converse with others. So there is this fascinating community within the Facebook group and so many students that I feel like I know because I see what they did today. However far away they are in the world, I see what they’re up to by way of their photos and posts and the like.

Basically, this blends in personal life through social media and professional life?

Absolutely, it’s made a course that might otherwise be just a very large statistic feel so much more personal, and I think that this alone helps keep people engaged, because they’re able to connect with other classmates, they’re able to motivate each other, and hopefully appreciate that they’re surely not alone in the experience, there are others out there who may very well be struggling with exactly the same problem that they are.

Focusing on teaching styles — what do you think about online videos as a teaching tool? Do you think they could foreseeably substitute face to face teaching or would they work better as a complement to it? Could students learn just by watching videos?

Not just by watching videos, but I don’t think face to face interaction is necessarily prerequisite for success. I think it depends on the quality of the materials and the nature of the content. For instance here on campus in CS50 we have 800 students in the class at the college, and surely sitting down in a very large theater, just listening to someone like me talk about computer science is not the most effective way to learn material. However, if we capture that same experience on camera, even for our local students, and empower them with the ability to fast forward, rewind, pause, hyperlink to related resources, search for keywords in the particular lecture, so that their minds can respond to the content as opposed to being dragged along by a human lecturer, I think that’s a far superior educational experience. Indeed, I think we are approaching the point where it is superior, educationally, to take CS50 online, as opposed to attending it in person synchronously, which, while it does afford you the opportunity to ask questions and interact- which has non-0 value for sure- the reality is technology provides students with so many other learning tools that might make it a better fit for their own personal learning style.

On the topic of learning tools, what are your 3 favorite innovative tools to adopt in a classroom environment, excluding obvious ones like Dropbox?

That’s a really good question! To be honest our use of technology, I would say, is fairly humble and fairly obvious; I wouldn’t say the crux of CS50 rests on any particular tool. You mentioned Dropbox, and the reality is, once we introduced it in the CS50 appliance, it was a remarkably compelling technology, because it effectively provides students with auto-backups and helps save them from themselves, and so in that sense it eliminated a huge stress if not a technical challenge for students, and hands down that’s been a compelling technology for us. In terms of other tools that the course uses at least for the online audience, it’s an inferior pedagogical tool, but Facebook, by nature of its engagement of students and its proximity to where students are spending time, has hands down been one of our most effective technological tools for keeping students connected and engaged, even though it’s not very easy to search: posts tend to disappear off of one’s radar once many others have been posted. But because you can tag classmates, and because students are already spending time there, it’s done wonders, I think, for connecting students and helping them get past technical challenges that they might have. As for the third, there absolutely are technologies that we rely on for the success of the class; things like virtualization, the Ubuntu operating system and any number of other tools that we’ve developed, so it’s certainly the case that we require and rely on software, but I dare say most any of that is replaceable. In fact we could teach many of CS50’s lectures even if we lost power in the building and students were sitting in the dark. I think with a few sheets of paper, a phone book and some other props we could have nearly the same academic experience, there might just be a little less “song and dance” to it. So I don’t think the latest and greatest technology has been at all core to CS50’s success. You can work wonders with just a few sheets of paper!

What are your thoughts about Virtual Reality for Education? Can tools like Oculus Rift really shape the future of teaching?

I’m not sure I would say education broadly. I would probably be inclined to expect it to have significant impact on certain areas. For instance I could imagine medical students making great use of a tool like that, so that they can actually perform or observe a surgery virtually, but in a manner that is as visually close to reality as possible; that a flat screen TV or video simply wouldn’t do justice to. I could imagine pilots or anyone who operates physical machinery benefitting from something quite like that. I could imagine engineers who have to create or build things with their hands and actually live in a 3-dimensional space better understanding the world and the tools around them if they can truly see it in 3 dimensions as though it were right there around them. I’m not sure I would so boldly say something like virtual reality is going to fundamentally change education itself. In fact, I worry that there’s too often hype around technology when really what I think matters is the ideas and the human aspect of a class. Indeed, in CS50, we bring in technology to the classroom really only when we have a problem that we want to solve, not simply because someone has released some new technology.

In my previous article I talked about videos and education, most specifically about educational YouTube channels. Do you think edutainers like Derek Muller (Veritasium), the Green brothers (CrashCourse) or Michael Stevens (Vsauce) are contributing to make the world a “more educated” place?

I would like to think it’s a mix of fun and education. As I said earlier in my “spoonful of sugar” cliché, the more engaging or even entertaining you can make the learning process, the higher the probability is that a student is going to stick with it, therefore the higher the probability is that they are going to get something out of it. So I think a mix of fun and work is certainly not a bad thing, and in fact if folks with edutainment online are engaging students all the more, that’s a win all around. In fact I think the proliferation of educational content is an amazing thing because we then, as a society, from the youngest of ages on up, can start learning material at a much faster rate than we might have previously, because we needn’t wait for our teachers to introduce the material. We can seek it out on our own far more actively, and as a society hopefully move far more quickly through our studies, so that at the end, the result, at the age of 18 or 22 or 30- whenever someone finishes his education cycle, their level of understanding will be far beyond where that of his predecessors might have been.

How does the future of University learning seem to you? What willhappen if education keeps democratizing itself and MOOCs like Coursera, Udemy, EDx, Ted-Ed and of course YouTube keep gaining traction?

I think these platforms are a good thing on the whole. Surely it’s a good thing to make knowledge and ideas all the more freely accessible to students at large, and indeed I view it as a positive for many university environments, whereby if I, as an industrious high school or even middle school student, can take it upon myself to learn higher level mathematics, or computer science, or study literature or history- on my own even, from home, online — and then arrive at university all the more prepared to study more advanced, higher level subjects right from the start, I think that’s an extraordinary thing. I think that on the whole this allows people to obtain access to education when they might not otherwise have had it, and even those who benefit from available university education can start off at a far more accelerated rate.

What are your objectives for the future? What news can we expect from David J. Malan and CS50 in 2015/2016?

I would say that we are particularly focused right now on establishing localized support structures for students, so that we don’t simply have CS50 at Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts and CS50 Online, but rather we have a number of localized support structures of teaching fellows, of alumni, who can help students get through the course’s material and challenges. This is currently taking the form of our collaboration with our friends at Yale, where students at Yale Universitywill be able to take CS50 with sections, with office hours, with teaching fellows in New Haven, Connecticut.

(CS50 moving right along)

We’ve also been working more closely, recently, with our friends at Miami Dade College in Florida who, similarly, are leveraging CS50’s material, but having local faculty work with students more closely in sections and office hours-like environments and we’re soon also going to be focusing on creating a number of teacher-centric resources, teacher editions- if you will- of CS50, giving high school teachers a curriculum that they can adopt or adapt in classrooms, in general focusing on empowering teachers and students to make use of any aspect of the material that might appeal to them.

Very interesting. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for you. In the meantime, thank you very much for taking some time to chat with me today.

Of course, thank you for the interest. It’s been a pleasure to chat.

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Note: If you wish to enroll for CS50 online, click here (it’s free and you have the option to receive a course certificate upon completion).

Disclaimer: I do not work for or represent EdX, Dropbox, Oculus Rift or any other organization mentioned in the article. Views are mine, personal, independent and purely inspired by David Malan’s work and vision that I’m keen to support.