Ask HN: What Happened to Open Courseware? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Happened to Open Courseware?

10 pointsporknubbins9 comments

I learned CS from online courses and have been trying to learn basic EE as well. to It seems to me that free online courses by places like MIT or similar institutions have been declining for the past 5 years at least.

It is too cynical to think that institutions recognized that STEM classes by great professors are a rare and valuable resource, and that by sharing them freely they undermined the value of attending one of these elite institutions? Cost alone cannot be the full explanation as existing resources that were excellent have been actively taken down.

I know that UC Berkley's videos were taken down for failing to conform to accessibility laws so that it kind of a special case, but it wouldn't have been impossible to get them subtitled if the motivation were there.

Of course many of these resources can still be found if you search hard enough, and individual Youtube creators have been getting better and better, but I would really be fascinated to hear why there was such an institutional flourish and decline?

I'm halfway through CS50P[1] which was just made this year, and it's one of the best courses I've ever taken (online for free or even at my real university).

[1] https://cs50.harvard.edu/python/2022/

I agree, I did the original Harvard CS50 and it was one of the best online courses ever done. I just wish there were more like this even if not to the same level of production.

Like all projects, I guess someone has to actually maintain them. Remember that these people are almost never in tech at all. They probably spent quite a bit of time figuring how to put up the lecture series the first time. After a few years, they might not even remember how they did it. If a service winds down, or the university IT department makes a change to the infrastructure, they're probably not going to have the same motivation to learn how to do it all over again just to keep some old lectures up online.

Yeah that seems like a likely explanation, but still if there was a push to start recording and publishing courses (beyond the level of individual professors who sometimes put their courses online) they must've had dedicated staff at some point.

It's hard to keep staff once a project is "done". Even if they wanted to stay, departments have budgets and its hard to justify a salary for someone to maintain free access to lectures. Based in the general lack of uniformity on university websites, I wouldn't be shocked if at least some of the people cobbling them together were students working part time who eventually just move on to the next stage of their careers.

It was a big trend a few years back. But many are still going strong - I for one do them all the time, and I've found it extraordinarily enriching. MIT will almost certainly never take them down, as it's part of their institutional spirit. Others on the other hand, I'm not too sure about.

MIT does have a lot of good videos on their Youtube OCW page- but they list 83 EE courses on their website when the vast majority are only a syllabus and problems sets with no video lectures.

I’ve typically found the videos associated with it by searching YouTube and the internet, albeit this approach is not consistently successful.

MIT OCW Operating Systems has been taken down in the last few months.

I can’t find the lecture recordings on YouTube or OCW anymore. Hope someone archived them.

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