Harvard’s CS50 Course to be Offered at Oxford this Fall

CS50 is traveling across the pond.

Beginning in October, Oxford University will launch its own online version of Computer Science 50, Harvard’s flagship introductory computer science course taught by David J. Malan ’99.

Oxford will join Yale University as the second institution to offer an edition of the course. Since 2015, Yale has run a full-scale CS50 with in-person sections, office hours, and teaching assistants, supplemented by recordings of Malan’s lectures at Harvard.

According to cs50.uk, Oxford’s website for the new course, “material originally developed by Harvard has been modified to fit the Oxford system.”

Unlike the Yale course, however, Oxford’s CS50 — run as part of the school’s Department of Continuing Education — will likely begin as a smaller online course for a group of local adults, Malan wrote in an email, adding that Oxford lacks a “tradition of undergraduate electives” typical of an American university.

He wrote that with the help of the local undergraduate computer society, CompSoc, he hopes “to expand the collaboration before long, perhaps with a CS50 Fair abroad.”

The new course originated after Malan reached out to Tom Crawford — a lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford and creator of the popular math education website “Tom Rocks Maths” — over Instagram after seeing one of the British professor’s videos.

“He slid into my DMs back in November, December of last year, just to basically be like ‘your math videos are very fun,’” Crawford said. “He just, as one educator to another, very kindly, just wanted to say, ‘This is great.’”

The two professors started chatting and eventually met in-person at Oxford in February when Malan spoke at a CompSoc event, shortly after Crawford took a position at the Department of Continuing Education.

Crawford — who is the Public Engagement Lead at the DCE — also taught the school’s Intermediate Linear Algebra course, which had both a free, online component and an in-person option for students enrolled at Oxford.

Daniel J. Wilson, an administrator at the DCE and a professor of infectious disease genomics, said that Crawford pioneered for us this model where you kind of have a two tier system” — one with a free “passive learning component” and one with “an immersive experience where you interact with the tutor.”

In addition to CS50’s lectures — available online through the Harvard-founded website EdX — Oxford will be “offering this immersive, interactive, scheduled live session every every week, for two hours,” according to Wilson.

“Hopefully that's going to actually be something that works for both students and works for us as educators,” Wilson said. “And maybe it's a model that we'll move more towards in the future.”

Crawford said that Malan’s vision for CS50 and expanding education access aligned with his work at Oxford.

“It just so happened to fit really nicely with what David’s doing and his sort of idea of sharing ideas around collaboration, around education to as many places around the world,” he said.

Malan wrote that he is excited to continue working with professors from other universities outside of purely research settings.

“There's long been a tradition of faculty collaborating on research outside the classroom, but less so on education inside the classroom,” Malan wrote.

“We hope that this collaboration will further signal that more of higher education could and should be collaborating so,” Malan added.

—Staff writer Caitlyn C. Kukulowicz can be reached at caitlyn.kukulowicz@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Andrew Yu can be reached at andrew.yu@thecrimson.com.