He isn't employed as a research professor. He's employed as a lecturer. Berkeley does have a lecturer position with security of employment (commonly called lecturer SOE or teaching professor). These positions are evaluated on teaching rather than research. I don't know how common it is in other departments, but I know the EECS department employs several teaching professors (which means many classes, especially 61A and 61B, are taught by professors whose primary job is teaching).
It looks like 61AS still uses the old glookup system that's restricted to enrolled students, but you could go through the regular 61A course (which is taught mostly in Python but covers most of the same material as 61AS) which started using the new OK autograder for all assignments last semester (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp15/). The tests are all run locally, so just add the --local flag to the command you run to prevent it from sending data to the server (which requires a Berkeley login).
I found out about it earlier this year when trying to set up Android Studio on the computers at my former high school. I couldn't figure out why I kept getting an error about the JDK being missing until I realized Eclipse had its own compiler and that's how students had been able to compile their Java code for the past four years.