Nigerian engineering students’ favorite teachers are Indian YouTubers
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
It is a shame that for the longest time, MIT OCW's CS & Math lectures were the only high-quality course-videos on the internet. Leveraging the IIT system to get 100% course coverage over every possible engineering course is genius. It has democratized education better and earlier than any unicorn. (Coursera, Udacity, etc.). Everything from assignments to
It is an indictment of American universities that despite having the funding, resources and technology to do this a lot earlier, it was eventually a 3rd world country that pulled it off. All without any profit motive. "Non-profit universities"?, yeah right. Just take a look at the courses on offer - https://nptel.ac.in/courses . Every imaginable engineering specialization is on offer, down to the most obscure.
University classrooms do not seem to have caught up to just how easy it is to access this information. Most professors do not have the same caliber or flair to do better than the best NPTEL video. I would like to new coursework designed around integrating video lectures of this sort as integral part of engineering instruction, with the in-person professor taking on the role or assistance and disambiguation, rather than being an inferior repeater of the same information.
There's an interesting industry around this. I wonder if they could have sold a license to them to me for $1 and then I would be free to put them on the Internet.
Alternatively, perhaps the YouTube automated captioning would have been sufficient.
There was a semi-famous example of an attorney suing Chipotle because the counter was too high and he claimed that he was being denied the full Chipotle experience of seeing the food be prepared in front of him. The workaround of literally bringing the food to him tableside and preparing it in front of him there was not deemed good enough, and Chipotle lost the suit. As you can imagine this attorney makes quite a bit of money going around suing people, for reasons the average person would not find genuine.
"Chipotle argued that its accommodation was adequate and told the Supreme Court that Antoninetti lacked standing to sue. The company cited a federal judge's findings in 2008 that Antoninetti had sued numerous businesses over disability access and had not shown that he was sincere about intending to return to the restaurants if they lowered their barriers." https://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Chipotle-loses-disable...
https://youtu.be/kr0qCySmAa4 as a shameless plug
The prof must have been mic'd up because the audio comes through quite clearly. We weren't told to act any specific way or anything and no students were told explicitly that it was for NPTEL.
But it wasn't recorded in a studio, just a normal classroom with students.
I assume knowledge discovery and sharing doesn't depend on your country's world status. A lot of fundamental knowledge was discovered and passed down to us from ancient times by people who would consider life in the so-called third world countries to be a significant upgrade.
Presumably, American universities wanted to 'protect' their information from others, maintaining exclusivity and gating off knowledge. It is this 'profit seeking behavior' that's shameful.
it's like school choice at global scale, why learn from a person you happen to be geographically located close to at school when you can learn from the best? Combine that with some of the new AI personal tutor tools coming out and I don't see how traditional schooling competes beyond acting as day care while parents work. And even at the college level a huge number of professors are obviously not passionate or skilled at teaching their subject and class sizes are too large to give student specific feedback.
I'm really looking forward to when you can take a placement test and have AI look at your work and solutions and then tell you exactly where the gaps in your knowledge are and create a study plan. So many people struggle with math because they didn't properly learn lower level fundamentals and without a good tutor you can't figure out what you need to learn. I feel like AI is getting to a place where it can probably get there, something like the GPT and Wolfram Alpha integration
AIs never get frustrated or tired
I don’t think you can make effective AI without them having boredom/frustration. Otherwise they might do very unintelligent things, like trying the same approach to a problem forever.
I don't understand why this needs to so adversarial but for what it's worth, American universities do already provide videos. You mentioned OCW, but EdX does so too, Berkeley did what NPTEL is doing a decade ago. Many universities do so piecemeal.
Remember, that if an entity is a nonprofit, that entity still needs to raise money from somewhere. It needs to show statistics about how impactful its efforts are.
The main reason why there isn't more of this is because its educational value as far as we can tell is marginal, pretty close to zero, at best.
For example, if a course already exists on OCW, the value of having another course from another university seems very low. Why would someone pay for another archive of a course at another university?
Then there are the completion statistics. They show that virtually no one completes MOOCs. OCW and EdX numbers show the same. It's hard to find anyone to give money to these programs.
Now, we might be measuring the wrong thing. In the US if you want to study something you will definitely find a university to do it. It could be that there is great value when the baseline you're comparing to is Nigeria. That's just not what US or EU universities look at in terms of numbers. How could they and who would they pitch this to for funding?
It's extremely expensive to keep a video archive like this up to date. NPTEL videos contain what in the US would be considered copyright violations on their slides. You cannot imagine how much effort OCW has to go into to avoid this. You simply couldn't do what NPTEL is doing in the US. For what it's worth, I think we should relax IP laws, but it is what it is.
I'll say this for the NPTEL archive. The quality is extremely variable. From a few really good courses, to a lot of rather poor ones, to things like the "Modern Computer Vision" course recorded in 2022 that was "modern" in maybe 2013-2014.
Also for educational value, I agree with the US numbers. If you look at the most popular youtube videos called out in the article, they're not like the NPTEL archive. Dry courses presented in textbook order. They're much more interactive, much deeper dives, that slowly walk you over some piece of material from different points of view. More like Khan academy than OCW.
This is where you are sadly mistaken. There is no canonical course out there! Every course is different; every teacher is different. Just because a course on, say, "Data Structures" exists, does not mean that every person who's interested in Data Structures can just watch that and find it equally informative. Many people may not understand the teachers accent; many may not like their teaching style (speed, delivery, stress, etc.). There are so many variables!
NPTEL has been doing this for a good 20 years now.
> EdX does so too
In my experience, EdX videos feel like the pop-sci version of the real course. Some excellent courses are 1:1 copies of OCW courses (6.0.31), but most others have been disappointing.
I transitioned from MechE to CS/ML, so I have spent a lot of time wading through sub-par Edx courses (and on other platforms), before finding the good ones by pure brute force.
> needs to so adversarial
My experience at American universities is that the professors and teachers are wonderful. But, the administration operates on ruthless profit seeking incentives, which often leads to worse outcomes for the nation as a whole. I am not adversarial per se. I just expected better from universities I deeply respect.
> virtually no one completes MOOCs. OCW and EdX
Which is exactly why I am a big advocate of just releasing the videos and assignments. Let people do it at their own pace, and quit at their own pace.
> NPTEL videos contain what in the US would be considered copyright violations on their slides. You cannot imagine how much effort OCW has to go into to avoid this.
Haven't thought of this. I might be a good point. Could you give an example ? I am not fully aware of the kind of copy right violations that occur on slides. Either ways, glad India treats IP laws with the kind of reckless abandon it deserves.
Bookmarked! https://nptel.ac.in/
Personally I sometimes find the thick accents hard to deal with, but really, when all other materials let you down, you can count on the indian tutor to cover the topic.
Big thanks to all of the (largely indian) internet tutors doing my lecturer's job.
If people are willing to put up with the challenge of dealing with an accent it means the quality of the video content itself must be extremely good
I suspect you get all sorts of parallel presentations of the material in a way that is quite helpful for retention.
Of course it's always a question of how good the presenter and the course and how good are students actually learn the topic from these videos, but at least people themselves praise them so there are definitely a sense of gratitude.
I’ve certainly seen Nigerians who understand the material well enough to present… is it the means of production? The non-CS skills (editing, audio, etc)? Just straight access to resources?
> Just straight access to resources?
IMO, as I understand it, it's just that. There are enough people in India who can do these videos, there are not enough people who can do that in Nigeria. And considering YouTube algos.. there are probably when you could had a more 'local' video but which was buried at th page.
If it were possible to get the small number of Nigerians who can do it to actually do it (maybe by providing a production suite in a box, if physical means of production is the issue), then gaming / overwhelming the algorithms probably isn’t that hard, just by actively encouraging local users to engage with the content actively (driving up the ads watched, and hopefully ignored).
With my background I could easily put together the suite in a box, I just haven’t the slightest clue who needs to get that box… that takes local expertise I just don’t have.
Clearly it can’t be something originated by a tech bro out of (until a few years ago) California - the literal last thing the world needs is another white guy with ideas about how to “fix” Africa - but there’s gotta be someone who can originate it demand-side, and articulate what they need rather than the other way around.
For one, I’m absolutely certain I could teach any motivated human on this planet the basics of how to make technically-adept content for YouTube inside six months, modulo someone to help with language barriers… but I haven’t the slightest clue how to identify someone in Nigeria (to keep running with this example) with the charisma and cadence and delivery chops and other local knowledge necessary to appeal to a Nigerian audience… hell, I barely know what language(s) that person should speak, never mind what music genre and tracks and cultural references they should use to get the attention of the age group they’d want to target. I mean I know how to choose a Nigerian presenter that would appeal to (and, perversely, not threaten) me and mine, but that’s not exactly the same thing, even when we’re talking about something as “universal” as CS instructional content.
But, hey, anyone in Africa (or anywhere with similar issues, really) with solid and serious ideas on how to fix that, hit me up.
My interests when I look tend to be about computing and mathematics. They may be of higher quality on other subjects.
The article discusses NPTEL. For most of its duration, NPTEL videos were straight recordings of classroom videos at India's top IITs.
I have found their rigor & instruction to be at part with MIT OCW (which was and still is the gold standard). The instruction style is more mono tone and less interactive. But, neither are negatives when watching a youtube video.
In my experience it's true a lot of Indian content can improve their video / audio or script proofreading... But they compensate being the only ones sharing their knowledge in niche areas for free. And when you're lost, I take whatever I have at hand even if it's on 240p with a potato mic, I'm grateful it exists.