David Malan

Like, fine, if you can't quite finish the course in 12 weeks, take 24, take 52.

Like, that's perfectly fine, especially if you're juggling other things.

This isn't necessarily your primary focus.

I think time is a perfectly reasonable knob to turn.

And I think that puts it well within reach of so many other people.

Yeah, I think CS50 itself will continue to evolve as it long has.

I do think it'll continue to change both in terms of tooling and concepts as AI sort of permeates our lives and technology all the more.

That said, I think it's always meant to be this introductory course in problem solving.

So I think there will be this backbone that remains.

And has been there even since my day, even though the problem sets are very different nowadays, the style of the lectures is very different.

If you really compare the syllabus from fall of 1996 versus now and what will be fall 2026, like they're not that fundamentally different.

They're just packaged very differently and stylized, I think, very differently.

Yeah.

But there's a lot of knowledge and conceptual framework and practical skills that are very invariant over the years.

What we have been doing in recent years, though, is steering in the direction of developing all the more of a complete curriculum.

So courses that students can take for free online through OpenCourseWare after CS50, earlier courses, gentler courses that students can take before CS50 itself or even instead of CS50 itself, depending on the goals that they have and the background that they're bringing to bear.

The plan in the near term is to branch out beyond computer science, working with a colleague of ours, Tom Crawford, at the University of Oxford on courses in maths or maths, as he says, in all sorts of fields so as to help uplift students who are taking, say, computer science courses, but don't have the requisite math background that might be ideal to have so that you don't struggle with certain things that we might otherwise just take for granted.

Beyond that, STEM more broadly is of interest.

And while we're not experts ourselves, working with colleagues of ours in the arts and humanities and trying to bring this form of theatricality and these memorable moments to a stage, but with far more people and subjects than me and mine.

I do think some healthy competition is good as if it drives different courses, different teachers to sort of try new things and teach differently.