The road to COMP4020: the professorial class

7 Apr 26

comp4020

Well, word is getting out. Several academic friends (and people I didn’t know before) have reached out to see if they could “audit” COMP4020. I think this is a super cool idea, and I’m keen to do more than just add them to the LMS—I’m keen to think through how we could do this really well.

I’m not going to throw them all in amongst the undergraduates (although tbh I reckon that’d be pretty cool too) but my plan is to run a separate studio session which I’ll run, and it’ll be full of academics. I won’t expect them to come to lectures (although they can if they want) but I think I want to have some sort of agreement at the start that if my colleagues want to audit the course then I ask them to commit to doing the pre-work and coming to the studio sessions to discuss it.

Honestly, if we can pull this off I think I’ll learn heaps from this, and I hope everyone else will, too.

If you’re an ANU academic and you’d like to learn about Agentic Coding (with Claude Code) and make stuff that benefits your teaching and research, then do get in touch at [email protected]. The course is in S2, so July–October for the main teaching period.

@online{swift2026theProfessorialClass,
  author = {Ben Swift},
  title = {The road to COMP4020: the professorial class},
  url = {https://benswift.me/blog/2026/04/07/the-professorial-class/},
  year = {2026},
  month = {04},
  note = {AT-URI: at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.document/2026-04-07-the-professorial-class},
}