  Interdisciplinary introduction to quantum information science (QIS) courses
are proliferating at universities across the US, but the experiences of
instructors in these courses have remained largely unexplored in the
discipline-based education research (DBER) communities. Here, we address this
gap by reporting on the findings of a survey of instructors teaching
introduction to QIS courses at institutions across the US, primarily at the
undergraduate or hybrid undergraduate/graduate level, as well as follow-up
focus interviews with six individual instructors. Key themes from this analysis
include challenges and opportunities associated with the diversity of
instructor and student backgrounds, student difficulties with the mathematical
formalism (especially though not exclusively with linear algebra), and the need
for better textbooks and curricular materials. We also find that while course
topics are ostensibly similar, each course is crafted by its instructor to tell
a different story about QIS and to uniquely balance goals such as accessibility
and academic rigor, such that no canonical introduction to QIS course emerges
from our dataset. We discuss the implications of this finding with regard to
the benefits and risks associated with standardization of curricula as QIS
coursework matures.
