The Video Mentor Program: Helping New Faculty with Teaching David A. Patterson, U.C. Berkeley Every Fall hundreds of new CS&E Ph.Ds join universities and begin teaching the next generation of computer scientists, spending considerable time and energy with little instruction in effective teaching. Recently I tried an experiment to help a new faculty member at Berkeley that was quite successful: by starting with a complete set of video tapes of lectures and the lecture notes of an outstanding teacher, this fresh Ph.D. received nearly the highest teaching ratings in the department while spending half the traditional class preparation time of new faculty. Thus this new faculty member spent more free time during his first year than is traditional for new faculty and yet CS&E students received better instruction than would have been expected. This experiment worked so well that I wanted to see if it would generalize to a national level. This suggestion was met with enthusiasm at the December board meeting of the Computing Research Association (CRA), so the University of California at Berkeley, CRA, and University Video Communications have agreed to sponsor a pilot program to make tapes available for Fall 1993. If you are a new faculty member, if your department is hiring new faculty, or if your own graduate students may soon be joining academia, then please read on. If you have any questions about the program, please send email to teaching@cs.berkeley.edu. The Problem In 1990-91 academic year, 312 academic new CS Ph.Ds started teaching CS&E courses. For the vast majority of them this is their first real teaching experience, and they have likely received no training on how to lecture. As a result, most spend an inordinate amount of time their first year preparing lectures and, by trial and error, develop their teaching style. The quality of the teaching in this first year are uneven at best. Even though new faculty are often given the lecture notes from a colleague, most spend a full day preparing for each lecture, and so lecturing three times a week leaves little time for anything else in their first year. This enormous time is spent in part because of a lack of confidence, since they have no experience to guide them how long lectures will take, how to handle questions, and so on. The Experiment In the Spring of 1992 Thomas Anderson, a fresh Ph.D from Washington doing work in operating systems, was assigned to teach an undergraduate course in operating systems. While he did volunteer to be a teaching assistant as a graduate student, this was going to be AndersonŐs first time giving lectures. He received a copy of the lecture notes for that course from John Ousterhout. Since everyone has a VCR today and we had video tapes of Ousterhout's lectures of that course, as an experiment I made a copy of Ousterhout's tapes for Anderson to keep at home for use while preparing lectures. The tapes had immediate benefits. A 50-minute tape had much more material than Ousterhout's three pages of notes per lecture, and Anderson found he would spend only half a day preparing for the next lecture while new faculty Anderson talked to were spending a full day. The second was that his self confidence was considerably enhanced since he knew how an outstanding teacher would present the material. From my per- spective, I was hoping that Anderson would pattern his style of teaching after an excellent teacher, picking up all the good ideas that Ousterhout had discovered from his 10 years of teaching. Further good news came in the student reaction to Ander- son's teaching. Berkeley asks students to rate instructors on a 7 point scale, with 7 representing extremely effective, 4 repre- senting moderately effective, and 1 representing not at all effec- tive. Anderson taught two sections of the undergraduate course, and the ratings were 5.8 and 6.3! Not only are these con- siderably above the average instructor rating of 5.0, I believe this is the highest rating of any new faculty member teaching their first undergraduate class. Here are written comments from undergraduates, and please remember these are from his first class: * "Tom Anderson is an intensely organized and professional educator. I'm amazed how well he taught this course given his experience. Really, one of the 3 best instructors I've had." * "He structures the lectures in a manner that you can understand some- what complicated ideas by isolating them and therefore making them easier to understand. Almost like a computer system, he layers teaching building upon the knowledge already learned." * "Wonderful -- I think one of the greatest things a prof. can do is get the students excited and interested in the subject material, and Tom has succeeded in doing that. BRAVO!!!" * "The best professor I had at Cal. He is enthusiastic, passionate about teaching, clear, willing to help, and gives excellent lectures." A Pilot Program It's possible that Anderson is simply a natural, a gifted teacher who would have received outstanding ratings no matter what we did. Even if that is true, Anderson believes both his self confidence was boosted and his preparation time was reduced by reviewing the tapes. To more rapidly discover the national value of this approach, under CRA auspices I am running a pilot program to determine if tapes of outstanding teachers will improve teaching skills and save time for new faculty. Here are the tapes available in this first offering: Instructor Berkeley Course Title Student Level Manuel Blum Efficient Algorithms Juniors and Seniors and Intractable Problems Randy Katz Components and Design Juniors and Seniors Techniques for Digitial Systems John Ousterhout Operating Systems and Juniors and Seniors Systems Programming Dave Patterson Computer Architecture Seniors and Grads All of these instructors have won the very competitive Distinguished Teaching Awards from the Academic Senate of the University of California, and two instructors have won national teaching awards (Ferst Teaching Medal from Sigma Xi and Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award from ACM.). These tapes are being offered at $300 per course (plus tax and shipping), which is quite a low cost. The cost of ordering one set of tapes at a time for a single course would be about $750, and companies are charged $5,000 to $10,000 to purchase a set of tapes to be shown to employees. Reasons for the low cost include batch process- ing orders and tape duplication, combining two lectures onto a single VHS tape, Berkeley faculty and video services donating their traditional royalties, Berkeley paying for these initial mailings, and University Video CommunicationsŐ willingness to not only avoid profits but to take a chance on losing money. A course will include between 22 and 27 VHS tapes, depending on the number of lectures per week. Rest assured that this is a good deal! Lecture notes for these four courses are available for anon- ymous FTP at address ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in the directory ucb/teaching. Feel free to get a copy of the notes whether or not you order tapes. If you are interested, please send email to teaching@cs.berkeley.edu by May 15, 1993. Checks must be received by June 15, 1993 and tapes will be shipped by July 15, 1993. If you pre- fer, you can send a credit card number by email. These tapes are recordings of what happened in Berkeley classrooms, and are not intended (or allowed) to be shown to students in place of an instructor. Beware that by ordering the tapes you are agreeing to participate in a survey at the end of the Fall 1993 term to determine the effectiveness of the tapes and the program. If the results of the pilot program are as positive as the Berkeley experiment, CRA will help expand and organize the program, selecting video tapes of outstanding CS&E teachers from across North America to help new CS&E faculty.