David Malan

i know there is data to confirm that it drives engagement but not necessarily educational outcomes we have fairly unusually in recent years stuck to the more traditional model of like csft's lectures are like three hours long and there are downsides to that absolutely but ironically online you avoid some of the in-person downsides because you can pause and rewind and fast forward you can search for something

open another tab, go down this intellectual rabbit hole, or rewind to figure out some detail you missed.

I mean, I can't even count how many times in college, high school, school more generally that I'm sure I zoned out.

And it's too often the case that if you miss some detail, you might as well leave the class at that point.

And online solves that for you.

And I haven't seen a need pedagogically for us to

break up the content into such small pieces and to sort of take that ownership away from the students, I think we'd prefer that they meet us halfway.

And if you need to take more than three hours to watch the lecture, that's totally fine.

But it's not designed for scrolling type consumption, I would say.

Yes.

So that we are very conscious of and the way we've generally described that is trying to create memorable moments.

And this is not for social media.

This is as much for the in-person audience as it is for the online audience.

And by memorable moments, I mean, like CS50's first lecture, we do this bit where I'll tear a phone book in half.

to demonstrate the performance of something called binary search, an algorithm for finding information more quickly than linearly searching the phone book one page at a time.

And that's really just to be dramatic.

It has less and less impact these days because most students of school age are no longer familiar with the technology known as a phone book.

It's literally analogous to the digital form in iOS or in Android, of course.

And so it doesn't take a huge leap for someone to realize, OK, this is the physical incarnation of that.

And it's just kind of fun, even though it's getting harder and harder to find the actual phone books.