Teaching
From first-year undergraduates to professionals in career change
I teach computer science to very different audiences, and I have always believed that the format has to follow the audience rather than the other way round: engineering students in initial training, adults in career change, managers in executive education, and students at the Institut Villebon — Georges Charpak, where the teaching model is deliberately experimental.
Across all of them I keep the same constraint: more than half of the time of a course unit is spent on projects and lab work, and assessment has to be aligned with what was actually practised.
Course websites
All my current courses have a public website, written in Quarto, with the full content, the exercises and their solutions, past exam papers and the slides.
Those sites are open source: the Edit this page link on every page opens the GitLab editor and lets students propose a correction as a merge request. Fixing a typo in a course is a perfectly good first contribution to a shared codebase.
Course units
Télécom Paris
| Level | Course unit | Role |
|---|---|---|
| L3 | Object-oriented programming in Java [INF103] | Lectures and labs |
| L3 | C language and operating systems [INF104] | Lectures and labs |
| L3 | From the logic gate to the operating system [ECE_3TC31] | Lectures and labs |
| L3 | Web programming in TypeScript [CSC_3TC35] | Course leader |
| L3 | Transversal projects [PACT] | Technical expert and tutor |
| M1 | Distributed systems development technologies [CSC_4SL03] | Course leader |
| M1 | Large-scale parallel computing [CSC_4SL07] | Course leader |
| M1 | Distributed Software Systems track seminars [SLR209] | Tutor |
| M1 | Master research and innovation projects [PRIM] | Supervisor |
| MS | Distributed systems for Big Data [DATA701 / INF727] — continuing education | Course leader |
| MS | Information systems infrastructure [MSIR 701 / 706] | Lecturer |
| Exec | Cloud systems, bespoke executive programme for Orange | Course leader |
I co-lead the Distributed Software Systems track (M1–M2) with Professor Petr Kuznetsov.
Elsewhere
Institut Villebon — Georges Charpak (since 2015): web programming in JavaScript/HTML/CSS, and C language and Linux. EFREI and EPITA-EPITECH: distributed systems for Big Data, and a Hadoop MapReduce from scratch project. Earlier in my career: École des Mines de Nantes, Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux, and INSA Toulouse.
Teaching methods
At the Institut Villebon — Georges Charpak, students are often uncomfortable with conventional teaching, so — with the support of their Centre for Educational Experimentation — I experiment: flipped classroom, hybrid and self-paced formats, project-based and problem-based learning, discovery workshops and gamification. Assessment is experimental too: automated grading with continuous progress tracking, video explanations of one’s own code, mini-challenges, and interviews.
With adult audiences I work by competency, usually in project mode, with a lot of peer interaction and tutoring by the more experienced participants.
Training the trainers
I am as much a trainer of trainers as a teacher, and that is in fact how I keep my own pedagogical training going: designing a workshop with a learning designer remains the best self-training device I know.
- France Université Numérique (2013–2016): created and ran the training workshops for the educational engineers of every institution launching MOOCs on the platform — about 120 correspondents in four cohorts.
- Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie: rolled the workshops out across North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco), then made them autonomous through detailed handbooks.
- UNESCO (2015): invited twice to present the feedback from that programme.
- “Monter son MOOC de A à Z”: co-created the first French meta-MOOC on MOOC design, with Matthieu Cisel — more than 11,000 registrations over three runs.
- MEDIANE, the IMT winter school in pedagogy: a regular workshop designer, always in a pair with a learning designer. The next one, in 2027, is about designing situations that combine learning and assessment.
- Télécom Paris teaching forum: co-organiser every year.