CS Education as a System: A Case for An Open Source CS Curriculum

Abstract:
In this talk, I discuss the nationwide gap between soaring student interest and employment demand in computer science and the limited opportunities most students have for studying CS once they get to college. Not only are we as a society massively under-providing education in computer science, we have no concrete or feasible plan to fix it. The economic cost to our both students and society is staggering. Further, because the schools with ample CS resources are those attended by the children of the very well off, the system of CS education is worsening, rather than addressing, income inequality.  To address both of these problems, I argue we need a plan to dramatically expand access to quality CS education in the colleges where low and middle income students go to school. MOOCs can help at the margins, but in practice, most low and middle income students need a human teacher. In this talk, I argue that part of the solution is to build an open source CS curriculum, with autograded projects, instructional software, textbooks, and slideware, as an aid for teachers who want to improve the education in advanced CS topics at schools attended by the children of the 90%. 

Bio:
Tom Anderson is the Warren Francis and Wilma Kolm Bradley Chair in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests span all aspects of building practical, robust, and efficient computer systems, including distributed systems, operating systems, computer networks, multiprocessors, and security. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as winner of the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, the USENIX STUG Award, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award, the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, and the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize. He is also an ACM Fellow, past program chair of SIGCOMM and SOSP, and he has co-authored twenty-one award papers and one widely used undergraduate textbook.