Show HN: Khan-dl – Khan Academy Course Downloader

It's a shame, but any other solution feels like it's a broken stair just waiting for someone to trip over it.

- The organization signaling to stakeholders that they condemn and take appropriate action against behaviour.

- The organzation engaging in damage control, minimizing future exposure of events linking back to the organization.

- Penalizing transgressive behaviour in a professional setting, through sanctions and revocations of merit, reputation, licensing or employment etc.

Actually, breach of contract could lead to lecture material not being legally available, if a lecturer has sole ownership of such. It could also be that future use of say, recorded lectures, involves compensation to the author. If an organization want to cut ties to the author, or just withhold compensation for a time, they might refrain from using the authors material.

Regardless, a lack of more effective means for enforcement does not absolve Berkeley of failing to follow the law, especially when they had internal resources to make their material accessible and chose not to do so.

Edit: apologies, misread your post and that is an interesting approach. Another way is to make the university pay back a portion of the federal funding they received, up to whatever amount they estimate it would take to make the materials accessible.

1. Release content not due to requirement but for general good. 2. Get sued because it's not captioned. 3. Have insufficient funds to caption so you pull material. 4. Get fined for pulling material. 5. Watch as no one does step 1 anymore.

It really feels like the Overton window on disability rights has shifted in the wrong direction.

Just because it’s free, the university has certain obligations from taking federal funding. These laws have been put into place in order to ensure disabled people have equal access to these educational systems.

One way to solve this would have been for Berkeley to charge a nominal fee (perhaps for a limited time as “early access” or similar) that could then be used to pay people that can transcribe the audio.

Instead, a lack of imagination and a lack of empathy leads to these resources being removed, a net loss for everyone.

California did not back then, but they now have their own legislation known as the Unruh Civil Rights Act and of course there’s the ADA/Rehabilitation Act.

Here’s the kicker - they have to do this whether it is posted publicly or not. The legal requirement does not only apply to public material, but to ALL material and the material still exists/can be accessed with Berkeley credentials. It also applies to future material produced that is used with students/in classes.

My guess is, they had to make it accessible regardless and did this out of spite. They had internal resources to help with this but chose not to do so/made it really expensive because of the volume due to not doing it in the first place.

It is kind of like Cybersecurity - people don’t like to spend the money until they have a breach, where it’s much more expensive to remediate and their costs would be much more manageable/risk reduced has they done it “right” the entire time.

My mother is a professor in the CSU system and I will say California public universities are beginning to take this much more seriously now, largely because of lawsuits.

I think that the point of textbooks is to lower the required subject matter expertise bar for teachers, leaving them to focus on teaching the material.

Unfortunately, when a teacher is merely familiar with the material rather than understanding it deeply, they will find it difficult to explore multiple (valid) ways of explaining it to students until it 'clicks' for each one, which means students often fall back on rote memorization and mechanical competence.

A video of a good (even great) teacher is no more interactive than a textbook, so if the student doesn't happen to 'get' the explanation as it is presented they are going to fall back on memorization and mechanical competence in exactly the same way.

There are interactive learning environments with extensive libraries of content that explore material in multiple ways as needed (as indicated via assessments) by students, but AFAIK they are all proprietary.

This is the problem. There aren't enough good teachers. Salaries/benefits/class size/prep time are a function of funding. Low autonomy/high stress are the result of our regulatory demands that appear to be on a one way direction: even more requirements and testing.

One particular friend left high end consulting to become a HS math teacher in an inner city school. He came with an academic background - having taught for a bit in colleges. Very optimistic. He left after 4 years because the number one problem in his classroom was keeping the kids focused at all. As he put if he had three concepts to cover in 50 minutes, he was lucky if could get 1 covered for the 2 or 3 students among the 30 that were trying to pay attention.

He was a good teacher and paid well. The school, school district, the community had complex problems: low income, crime, food insecurity, parents who had to work multiple shifts, etc. He couldn't solve all these problems before explaining right triangles.

I don't believe the model that we have today will survive the next 25 years.

I agree that good teachers and good schools are necessary. But we don't seem to be generating or supporting enough of them. So I think the solution is to look elsewhere entirely. Break up the problem. Remove the dependence on good teachers and good schools.

BTW, if you're a teacher. Thank you for what you do.

> There's a surefire way to increase the supply of good teachers, increase salaries & benefits. Reduce classroom sizes.

I don't disagree, but either one of those solutions alone is a pretty hard sell, trying for both at once isn't going to get much traction.

Personally, I suggest focusing on classroom size first, as it should improve the performance of existing teachers and at least make the job less unattractive to new teachers.

This has all been done to very, very little effect.

Reading, Math and Science scores are basically flat since 1970. K-12 employee numbers have almost doubled over the same period and costs per student have almost tripled.

https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-officials-v...

Side note: This also increases demand for teachers, because any single teacher now teaches fewer students.

If you reduce class size by 1/3 you need 50% more teachers than before (at the same workload, to teach the same number of students). If you reduce class time by 1/3, you again need 50% more teachers.