David Malan

There's so much meta work involved in education that probably doesn't need to be borne by so many people that the computer scientist in me like invariably wants to factor that out somehow.

And so I absolutely think that we educationally as universities, as schools should be leaning on each other much more.

I'd like to think that's a lot of what drives us in terms of CS50's own mission and the work that we do, but we too have encountered frictions along the way.

It was very unusual, for instance, for 10 years that we were collaborating with our friends down the road in New Haven at Yale University, where we were offering CS50

on both campuses in parallel.

And more recently, we've been doing this with some of our friends at Oxford and lifelong learning group there.

This is very much still the exception to the rule.

Unfortunately, even after 10 plus years of MOOCs, massive open online courses,

I dare say a lot of institutions, a lot of faculty are very set in their ways.

In fact, one of my regrets of the COVID era was that we had this unprecedented opportunity now and almost mandate to move everything online.

And we therefore had this opportunity to say, hey, to Harvard students, why don't you take this Stanford course or this UCLA course or this Yale course or this MIT course that you couldn't necessarily take in person for lack of transport or for lack of safety at the time?

And I could get no one on campus to get on board with this idea of maybe offering one computer science course on this campus and let the other students take it.

Then you offer, as we did at Yale, like a digital humanities class on some other campus and let the Harvard students take it.

And there's just not much of an appetite, I dare say, in higher education, if not education writ large,

for that resource sharing, and I think there should be.

I don't think there should be one computer science course, introductory course.

I think some healthy competition is a good thing.

I don't think there need to be thousands, probably not hundreds, maybe dozens from some of the best teachers, the best schools would probably benefit us all.

If those same teachers then were not put out of work, but then could lean on each other

use some of the materials we've created, adopt, or as we say, adapt some of our own resources and treat education as a buffet of educational materials that you can then make your own without having to do so much of the same legwork and reinventing wheels across school and state lines.