In the 1980s, John L. Hennessy, then a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, shook up the computer industry by taking the concepts of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) to the masses.
Hennessy, now president of Stanford, is once again designing, testing, and advocating a new architecture, this time in the field of university education. He first began rethinking research at universities and recently began reimagining university education itself.
EEE Spectrum profiled Hennessy and his career as a computer architect and entrepreneur in “RISC Maker." This year, we checked in on Hennessy’s recent efforts to shake up higher education. Stanford has a long history in distance education, which in the 1990s moved from closed circuit TV to Internet delivery. More recently, the university explored offering online courses to a much larger audience with a programming class for iPhone applications, first available in 2009, that has been downloaded more than one million times. Since then, Stanford has been developing and testing tools for producing, distributing, and enabling social networking for online courses. This past fall, more than 100 000 students around the world took three engineering classes—Machine Learning, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and Introduction to Databases. Hennessy says that’s just the beginning. In fact, in his vision of the future, the lecture hall—those ubiquitous tiers of seats with fold-down writing arms, curving around a professor at a podium—will play a much smaller role...