[bachmeier]

My comments were focused specifically on the lecture style - I just don't see the CS50 lectures as particularly effective. The students are almost certainly doing their learning by reading the textbook, attending the labs, and doing the problem sets that you mention. I have trouble seeing how the lectures contribute to truly learning the material. They're designed for passive consumption.

I wasn't referring to depth of topics but depth of learning. The latter is how deep you understand a given set of material. Passive consumption of an entertaining lecture doesn't help much.

> Still quite a bit of people decide to concentrate on CS after taking the class, so it must be doing something right in that sense...

That means it's optimized for recruiting folks to the field of CS rather than optimized for student learning. The only reason I've ever taken a class is to learn.

[aspaviento]

> Passive consumption of an entertaining lecture doesn't help much.

I wholeheartedly disagree. It's said on a video linked in another comment, students can learn by associating the emotions they are experiencing with the content they are receiving. Specially if his classes are that outstanding.

[bachmeier]

This research, out of Harvard, disagrees:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t...

That's certainly not the only evidence that passive lecturing isn't particularly effective:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/lectures-arent-just-...

It's not hard to find other papers showing the same thing.

[aspaviento]

You misunderstood me, I never said passive lecturing was better than active, what I said is that it is useful (as opposed to your "doesn't help much") and as an "entertaining lecture" (quoting you again), not as a boring one as the second article states. Clearly an active one has more chances of sticking with you but don't you remember any particular scene in a show that for whatever reason you can't never forget?

[joshocar]

Passive lecturing is awful in general, but I'm not sure what the alternative is. At least with an online course you can pause, rewind, rewatch. With an in person lecture you are at the mercy of your note taking ability and the book. MOOCs were just becoming a thing when I was in graduate school and I really think my undergraduate experience would have been much better if they had existed then.