Porter Pioneers Innovative Approaches to Computer Science Education
Adam Porter is working to turn computer science education on its head.
Porter, a professor of computer science with an appointment in UMIACS, does not believe in traditional, lecture-only classes. Instead, he has been refining a “flipped classroom” approach—working on problems in class, while using multimedia to teach concepts to students outside of class, in lieu of the usual lecture in-class, homework outside of class paradigm.
He is currently teaching “Programming Handheld Systems” at UMD, while also teaching a related Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Android development on the Coursera platform, which was the first-of-its-kind when he co-created the course in 2013.
Porter’s classes are wildly popular—the MOOC has more than 500,000 students enrolled and his UMD course routinely has a large waitlist.
“When we come into the classroom, I want students to put what they’ve learned into action,” he says. “I don't want them to just listen to me. I want them to try out the things that I’ve talked about; I want to be able to look the students in the eyes and see if they understood that concept. If they can’t apply it, then they didn’t really understand it.”
Porter has been putting an innovative spin on education for nearly 25 years at UMD, where he began teaching in 1991 as a lecturer in computer science soon after earning a doctorate at the University of California, Irvine.
More recently, Porter has created a Video Production Lab in the Department of Computer Science so that all faculty members can produce videos and multimedia content for their classes. He has also worked closely with computer science professor and UMIACS faculty member Ben Bederson to design the department’s CS Education for Tomorrow program, aimed at spurring educational innovation.
“So much of what we learn today is not captured in a formal educational setting, but through videos on YouTube, short classes, talking to people,” Porter says. “So as teachers, our value to our students is going to become less and less about basic information transfer, and more about how we create complex educational experiences that touch students personally. And I think that’s going to come from creating on campus experiences that can’t be easily replicated through a YouTube video watched in your basement.”
It comes as no surprise that Porter recently received the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences Board of Visitors’ (BOV) Creative Educator award.
“Adam Porter is one of our star professors for now and the future,” says BOV Chair Thomas Snitch, who is also a UMIACS visiting professor. “His MOOC course on programming mobile apps has attracted hundreds of thousands of students from around the globe, making it the second largest enrolled single course offered by Coursera. On campus, [Porter] has been a pioneer in creating multimedia content for his lectures, although based on what he does in front of a classroom, many would hesitate to call it a lecture—it is, in the words of a student, an academic tour de force.”
Yiannis Aloimonos, a professor of computer science with an appointment in UMIACS, nominated Porter for the award, citing his numerous accomplishments and forward thinking.
“He is the new professor,” Aloimonos writes in his award nomination. “He uses his talent and deep knowledge of computer science to devise new techniques for making learning in his classes more effective, more efficient, more grounded, more fun.”
—Story by Melissa Brachfeld