Saying that EdX is “the biggest change in education since the invention of the printing press” ignores the fact that lectures are often the least educational aspect of college.

The flipped classroom has arrived in higher education.

While overestimating the value of competition can lead to less, not more, innovation, underestimating the value of cooperation tends to discourage the exploration of possibilities for creative interaction. With escalating costs, limited resources and growing political concern about student debt, institutions should be developing innovative ways to cooperate that will prove to be mutually beneficial, in the same way that companies merge and become more efficient.

Mark Taylor, “How Competition is Killing Higher Education“

This is one of the (mostly-overlooked) points I made a few weeks ago in my post “More Universities Should Shut Down Their Computer Science Programs“. It’s by the same author I cited in my post, Mark Taylor of Columbia University.

In a world in which information-sharing is easier than ever, it should not be necessary for students to tolerate a mediocre academic department. Instead it should be possible for students to take advantage of the best instructors and curricula no matter where they happen to be located.

Some people got what I was trying to say and agreed that there could be a more practical balance in undergraduate CS programs. But most commenters (especially those on Reddit and MetaFilter) completely misunderstood the point of the post, defending the discipline of computer science even though I had stated explicitly in the post that I wasn’t attacking the discipline of computer science or basic systems programming, but rather the way it was being taught to undergraduates by universities.

But people see what they want to see, I guess, and it would have been easy (particularly if you just read the headline or first few sentences) to come away with the sense that I was some kind of self-interested troll bent on destroying the academic discipline that may readers had devoted four years of their young lives to follow. I assure you, I am no troll! I come not to destroy the discipline computer science, but to reform it.

(Related: I’m going to recommend that CS majors take a few more upper-division English courses. There is this thing called “close reading of a text” that you may find useful, and most universities are pretty good at teaching it.)

Anyway, we’ve got a business to run and developers to train. And coincidentally, back in March we received a suggestion from an intrepid CodeLesson user to do a course on data structures and algorithms. We thought this was a peachy idea, so we’ve promoted the course to our catalog and added it to our Instructors Needed page. If you feel passionate that software engineers need computer science fundamentals to do their jobs and you have a few spare hours to devote to teaching (and want to make some cash), please sign up or talk to us.

.@MittRomney Wow, half of new college grads are unemployed! I assume you’ll fix that by reducing the number of college graduates, right?

— Jeffrey McManus (@jeffreymcmanus) April 24, 2012

You can follow me on Twitter to be subjected to more of these.

1. Most undergraduates and professionals actually want to learn applied software engineering, not “computer science”. Most companies want to hire college graduates who know applied software engineering. But most university CS programs don’t actually teach applied software engineering. This isn’t to say that CS isn’t useful or valuable (even to someone who goes on to become an applied software engineer). But the majority of university CS programs are oriented to training undergraduates to become either systems programmers or academic computer scientists. I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t what most 18-year-olds who enter undergraduate CS programs actually want to do. And I’m certain that the ratio of the demand for software engineers to systems programmers in industry is on the order of 100:1 (maybe even 1000:1).
2. University undergraduates are not discriminating consumers of education. This has a lot to do with the “halo factor” of schools that are perceived to be elite. If you get into the University of Michigan (which has an elite CS program) and you spend forty hours coding in Java while you get your four-year degree, you’re probably feeling pretty good about yourself, at least until you get your first job interview after graduation and they realize you can’t actually code. But if you’re in a CS program that happens to be awful, there’s no way you’d know it as an 20-year-old undergrad. This means that consumers of the resource (which in an economy usually punish substandard products by taking their business elsewhere) are really a captive audience. This is one big reason why all universities are slow to adapt and reform in general.
3. It should not be necessary for two universities located within commuting distance of each other to have the same academic department (this goes for any department, including English Literature as well as CS). To put this another way, wouldn’t it make more sense for UCLA and Cal State LA to have a single, combined computer science program that’s among the best in the country, instead of two mediocre computer science programs? (The city of Phoenix doesn’t have four major league baseball teams for the same reason.)
4. Applied software engineering is a discipline that lends itself to being effectively taught online. There’s no reason to suffer through a mediocre or outdated CS program when lots of good online courses are available. If you’re looking to actually learn something (instead of just getting your ticket punched) you should be able to pick from whichever course best suits your learning objectives, even if that course isn’t available at your school.
5. Most university computer courses simply aren’t that good if your goal is to get a job doing applied software engineering. This is because the Ph.Ds who are teaching in these programs generally got their degrees from five to ten years ago at a minimum, when the tools and tactics for software engineering were very different. The industry simply changes faster than academia. Most (not all, but most) universities just can’t keep up with this pace of change using the standard administrative playbook. This isn’t a criticism of the smart, hard-working folks who work in our CS departments; it’s a criticism of the way their departments are organized.
6. University academic departments in general should have limited charters and should be reorganized frequently. (Again, not just CS departments, but all departments.) I spent nearly all of my undergraduate career working in academic administration, and I can say that academic departments exist mostly to protect resources (mostly money and people). They don’t really exist to serve students. One good example is cited in an awesome book on educational reform called Crisis on Campus by Columbia professor Mark Taylor: one of the most pressing problems that humanity has today is obtaining clean drinking water. Yet no university has a Department of Water. Why is this? Because campuses are an endless successions of zero-sum games: the formation of a new department necessarily means that resources must be taken away from existing departments, so existing departments viciously defend the status quo, even when that doesn’t align with reality. Computer science education has not been in alignment with reality in a long, long time.

I’m going to pre-empt the inevitable Hacker News countertrolling by responding in advance to the arguments that always come up when I talk about the way that software engineers are trained:

1. You need to have a good basis in algorithms and higher math to be successful as a software engineer, and computer science provides that. That’s probably true for systems programmers. It’s not really true for the remaining 99% of software engineers, the vast majority of which will never do pointer arithmetic and shouldn’t really have to. (If you accept this argument, then you must also accept the notion that all plumbers must have the ability to smelt copper and forge their own pipes, because how could you possibly lay pipes effectively without having ever created one with your bare hands from elemental materials?) Otherwise, you’re just enforcing the priesthood of the technologist, which is not a good thing for the profession or for society.
2. I’m a systems programmer and/or a CS major and your post makes me confused, sad, or angry. It’s great that you’re a systems programmer and/or a CS major; I value your service to humanity. But this isn’t really about you. This is more a criticism of university administration than the relative worth of systems programmers.
3. Coders should learn by coding, not sitting in classrooms. I’m actually not a big fan of classrooms either, but this unfortunate argument is like an abused child who boasts about how a lifetime of beatings was responsible for their good manners and generally pleasant demeanor. The state of software engineering education today is terrible, so it’s no wonder that a lot of good coders are forced to become autodidacts. But learning it on your own isn’t the best or most efficient way to do it. Saying you learned how to code on your own isn’t an indictment of the discipline of teaching software engineering; it more likely indicates that the quality or quantity of software engineering instruction isn’t what it should be. Which leads us to…
4. You have a dog in this hunt. Yes, of course. I’ve taken coding courses in CS departments at three different US colleges. I’ve taught coding at the university level as well. I started CodeLesson because I wanted to provide awesome, up-to-date instructor-led coding courses, since a lot of universities and businesses aren’t providing this today.

At one point someone asked which format was more difficult. You’d think that a four-day format would be, but it’s really not. The four day format is an endurance marathon, but you can do it if you’re very well prepared. And I can talk forever if I have to. Plus, in a four-day format you have a lot time to adapt to your audience, and if you screw up day 1 you can make it up on days two through four.

Shorter formats are much harder. I’ve often described the 45 minute conference talk as similar to landing on an aircraft carrier. The time window is tiny, and the margin for error is pretty much nonexistent. You have to do a lot more planning to ensure that your talk doesn’t go overtime, and if you inadvertently end early the conference logistics can get screwed up.

This week I’m working up a talk about the business side of CodeLesson that we’re proposing to a tech conference. (I’ll name the conference later, assuming my talk is accepted; it’s a competitive process and there’s a good chance we’ll be cut.) I have to give the talk to the conference organizers using a screen share on Friday, and then they’ll decide if it’s worth having me for the in-person conference. The format? Three minutes of me talking, followed by ten minutes of Q&A. Rough! This is going to be the smallest aircraft carrier I’ve ever landed on.

I’m a pretty good extemporaneous speaker, but there’s no way I’d do a three-minute talk without extensive preparation. For me, the big risk is that I’ll run overtime; three minutes is really nothing. So to prepare, I started by locking myself in my office. I went through my demo using the stopwatch function on my phone without really looking at it. The first run-through, I got up to four and a half minutes and I was about half-way through my slides. Whoops.

I backed up and deleted about 25% of my slides. Then I scripted what I was going to say on each slide. Normally I hate doing this because it slows the talk down and can make the talk seem stilted (you know, like you’re reading from a script). But even if your talk is pretty tightly scripted you can still make it sound like it’s extemporaneous. It’s not necessary to say every single word on the script, as long as the sentences that are coming out of your mouth still make sense. And, most importantly, varying the tone of your voice while reading (emphasizing the important words and the last word of a sentence) can go a long way toward making your talk seem more natural and unscripted.

After doing this, I got the talk down to about two minutes and forty seconds, which I think is where I’ll leave it. But there’s one more step to polish the talk up a bit more. I recorded the talk (using ScreenFlow) and put it on DropBox for members of my team to review. That way they’ll be able to tell me if my talk missed any important points, or whether I should take something out.

I’ll still need to give the talk live via screen-sharing (and in person at the conference if the talk is accepted), but having a recorded dress-rehearsed version of the talk will also help in case something goes wrong (like I get sick that day or the screen sharing doesn’t work). One of the keys to being a good public speaker is to use belt and suspenders on everything — you want to rely upon as few external variables as possible, particularly technical aspects that aren’t in your control.

Fingers crossed for Friday.

The notion that the first amendment gives you the right to say whatever you want is a common misinterpretation. Coming from the pen of a news writer, it’s particularly egregious; I would expect a reporter to know better. The first amendment doesn’t actually provide the right to say whatever you want in whatever context. (It certainly doesn’t give somebody the constitutional right to be on the radio or to accept payments from sponsors.) Instead, the first amendment exempts a very narrow class of political speech against regulation by the government.

But the government doesn’t have a dog in this hunt; the tussle is between Limbaugh and his corporate sponsors, who have come to the conclusion that his show is too toxic to sponsor (at least for the moment).

What Limbaugh is experiencing is not some horrible injustice but the not-so-invisible hand of the free market. If he’s really on the site of liberty and free markets, you’d think he’d welcome this market-enforced course correction. But it’s clear that this is just another example of how conservative money-men like Limbaugh only believe in their principles when those principles happen to coincide with their agenda.