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The major crisis in university CS Ed is that there are nowhere NEAR enough qualified professors to teach all the subjects. There will not be enough in the next 5 years, assuming there is no radical change in qualification expectations. There are simply not enough PhDs being granted to keep up with the demand of students, and not enough students want to stick around and teach when they could be making tons of money in industry instead. Universities have a short list of options. Having instructors who are smart and understand the material but may not be masters of it? That's a really good situation to be in, compared to the worst case scenarios. Sure, maybe Mark doesn't feel comfortable live coding in front of a classroom for web dev (a skill, by the way, that changes dramatically every year). But he's someone who cares about teaching, plays around with his teaching strategy, and is smart (I mean, he's freaking Mark Guzdial). With those three facts, his students are in a significantly better situation than the average university class. I had to teach "Intro to Algorithms" the past two semesters. I got an A in that class when I took it, and I'm able to solve most problems from the textbook. Does that mean I can stand up in front of the class and solve any question from the textbook? Absolutely not. Does that make me less qualified than Skienna or Djikstra? Absolutely. Does that mean I can't teach the class? I don't think it does. I can build and grade assignments, I can lecture in class, I can answer most reasonable questions that students have, and I can build good exams that fairly measure my students' knowledge. I'm sure my students would prefer to have an instructor who can do all of those things and also be able to perfectly answer any possible Algorithms question they may have. But unfortunately, that person doesn't exist at University of Delaware - or if they do, then they're teaching one of the other required courses, and we couldn't spare them to teach Intro to Algorithms. It's just the way things are with hiring. I don't think my students' careers are going to suffer because I can't whip out a proof for the reduceability of Vertex Cover to 3-Sat live in front of them. Ironically, I would feel extremely confident about live coding for a Web Dev course. Hopefully I get a chance to teach one at some point, because I'm pretty sick of teaching Intro to Algorithms :) |
Especially not since there typically isn't a good university career path for teachers. Research is generally valued a lot more when it comes to getting a permanent position etc.