[bmitc]

You don't consider paying tens of thousands of dollars as creating responsibility to educate?

Of course, students need to be active in the learning process. But in my experience, it is more likely that professors and departments are terrible at educating than it is for students to not be motivated to learn.

[ramblerman]

> You don't consider paying tens of thousands of dollars as creating responsibility to educate?

I get OPs point. It's like getting an english literature degree and you've never read a book on your own.

My guess is most people needing the missing semester never coded outside of their assigned tasks. Which is fair enough, but its surprising to me to meet phd candidates who marvel over the missing semester (I've met 2).

[bmitc]

To be clear, I was responding to the commenter's general point and not regarding this specific class or its contents.

[sokoloff]

There’s absolutely a responsibility to educate on the topics needed for the degree to be granted.

This class is an adjacency to an EE or CS candidate. Are universities also failing their students by not offering/requiring a touch-typing class? I don’t think so, in large part because computer science is not programmer occupational training.

[Niksko]

A CS course isn't programmer occupational training in name only. Practically, there aren't many CS research jobs and working as a programmer is more often than not the career path for someone with a CS degree.

Universities can choose to be puritans about what CS is as you seem to be advocating for, or they can be realists and fill a very real gap in skills and knowledge.

Your point about "the topics needed for the degree to be granted" is also a very purist view of the role of university. Is the role of university solely to teach a curriculum that aligns with some abstract ideal of what a particular degree title means? Partly it is. But again, that doesn't match the expectation and the practical reasons why students choose a course. There are very few students studying CS for the beauty of it. Those that do probably do end up in academia and don't need this course. The rest are there for jobs, and they certainly could benefit from this.

[patmorgan23]

What occupation are the vast majority of CS students intending to pursue when they enter a computer science program? What occupation did the vast majority of computer science graduates end up pursuing?

I'm willing to bet the answer to both of those questions is a computer programmer.

[ModernMech]

> Are universities also failing their students by not offering/requiring a touch-typing class?

Universities make assumptions based on the larger student body as to what requirements are needed for admission. Generally, we assume students can read and write and have general computer literacy, but actually the last assumption is starting to fray a bit; more and more, students are coming into school without basic computer desktop literacy. This hasn't been a problem for decades, as students tended just to pick up skills like touch typing. But today, some students are hard pressed to to save a file to the desktop.

I could see universities might actually have to start adding computer literacy as an entrance requirement, the same way we require basic reading and writing and English speaking, so we don't have to teach those things.

[tkiolp4]

A degree takes already 3 or 4 years. In order to incorporate this “missing semester” universities would have to either a) remove existing material to make space for it, or b) extend the degree one more semester.

I don’t think universities should remove existing material in general to incorporate “bash 101”. Mainly because learning bash is easy and one can learn it by oneself without a professor. Extending the degree one more semester doesn’t make much sense either.

[BeFlatXIII]

Half the value of having the material in a course is that it specifically highlights what should be learned.

[_dain_]

>a) remove existing material to make space for it, or b) extend the degree one more semester.

It's not literally an entire semester's worth of material. "The Missing Semester" is just a catchy name they gave it.

The site says:

>The class consists of 11 1-hour lectures, each one centering on a particular topic. The lectures are largely independent, though as the semester goes on we will presume that you are familiar with the content from the earlier lectures. We have lecture notes online, but there will be a lot of content covered in class (e.g. in the form of demos) that may not be in the notes. We will be recording lectures and posting the recordings online.

And in that paragraph the word "semester" it doesn't mean a normal full-length semester:

>The class is being run during MIT’s “Independent Activities Period” in January 2020 — a one-month semester that features shorter student-run classes.

So, 11 lectures over the course of a month (actually three weeks if you look at the listed dates). And it's an unofficial class taught by grad students, alongside other classes.

If a CS program made this official, it could fit into the first two weeks of the course. And that'd be a great thing, since these tools make you way more productive in everything computer-sciency you do. It's like compound interest: the earlier you get good at the shell, the bigger the returns.

I think they call it the "Missing Semester" because

a) it's as useful as an entire semester

b) when you don't already know this stuff, it seems much bigger and more difficult than it really is. and your fellow students who already do know it seem like they're a semester ahead of you in comparison.

c) it might take you a semester to learn the material if you don't have instruction, feedback, a roadmap, while you're juggling your other academic obligations. people remember the things they succeeded in teaching themselves but forget the immense wasted time of rabbit holes they went down because they didn't have a mentor to guide them.

-----

I didn't study CS, I studied Physics instead. My hands-down favourite course, the one whose material I still use even though my day job has nothing to do with physics, was called something like "Problem Solving for Physicists" (google "university of sheffield PHY340", you can find PDFs of past exam papers to see what I'm talking about). It was this lovely hodge-podge of material, much of which had nothing specifically to do with physics at all. It had stuff like dimensional analysis, how to come up with sensible approximations and Fermi estimates, how to sanity check your calculations, coming up with lower and upper bounds, how to rule out certain classes of solutions even when you can't find the exact answer, that kind of thing. It was in the second or third year of my course, I forget which, but either way nothing in it had more than high-school level mathematics, so it could have been taught in the very first part of the first year, before we even did mechanics 101. That would have been tremendously helpful for everything that came afterwards. That was my "Missing Semester" (or perhaps, "Misplaced Semester").