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Comment by pedrolins | Hacker News Reader

I was excited to check out lecture videos thinking they were public, but quickly saw that they were closed.

One of the things I miss most about the pandemic was how all of these institutions opened up for the world. Lately they have been closing down not only newer course offerings but also putting old videos private. Even MIT OCW falls apart once you get into some advanced graduate courses.

I understand that universities should prioritize their alumni, but there’s literally no cost in making the underlying material (especially lectures!) available on the internet. It delivers immense value to the world.

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2024 lecture videos are on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rN4wG6Nk6sNpTEb...

Those don't have DPO/GRPO which arguably made some parts of RL obsolete.

check out cs 336 stanford, they cover DPO/GRPO and relevant parts needed to train LLMs.

It's also covered by CS329H.

I can assure you that lacking knowledge in DPO (and especially GRPO it’s just stripped down PPO) is not a dealbreaker.

One of my favorite parts of the 2024 series on Youtube was when Prof B explained her excitement just before introducing UCB algorithms (Lecture 11): "So now we're going to see one of my favorite ideas in the course, which is optimism under uncertainty... I think it's a lovely principle because it shows why it's provably optimal to be optimistic about things. Which is kind of beautiful."

Those moments are the best part of classroom education. When a super knowledgeable person spends a few weeks helping you get to the point where you can finally understand something cool. And you can sense their excitement to tell you about it. I still remember learning Gauss-Bonnet, Stokes Theorem, and the Central Limit Theorem. I think optimism under uncertainty falls in that group.

I've seen arguments that opening up fresh material makes it easy for less honest institutions to plagiarize your work. I've even heard professors say they don't want to share their slides or record their lectures, because it's their copyright.

I personally don't like this, because it makes a place more exclusive with legal moats, not genuine prestige. If you're a professor, this also makes your work less known, not more. IMO the only beneficiaries are either those who paid a lot to be there, lecturers who don't want to adapt, and university admins.

I wish we would speed run this to where these super star profs open their classes to 20,000 people at a lower price point (but where this yields them more profit)

That's basically MOOCs, but those kinda fizzled out. It's tough to actually stay focused for a full-length university-level course outside of a university environment IMO, especially if you're working and have a family, etc.

(I mean, I have no idea how Coursera/edX/etc are doing behind the scenes, but it doesn't seem like people talk about them the way they used to ~10 years ago.)

They're still around and offering new online courses. I hope they don't have any problems to keep afloat, because they do offer useful material at the very least.

I agree it's hard, but I think it's because initially the lecturers were involved in the online community, which can be tiring and unrewarding even if you don't have other obligations.

I think the courses should have purely standalone material that lecturers can publish, earn extra money, and refresh the content when it makes sense. Maybe platform moderators could help with some questions or grading, but it's even easier to have chatbot support for that nowadays. Also, platforms really need to improve.

So, I think the problem with MOOCs has been the execution, not the concept itself.

Most MOOCs are venture funded companies not lifestyle business so they will not likely do sensible user friendly things. They just need to somehow show investors that hyper growth will happen. (Doesn't seem like though that it did happen)

They are mostly used for professional courses. Learning python, java, gitlab runners, micro services with NodeJS, project management and things like that

Most of the MOOCs were also watered down versions of a real course to attempt to make them accessible to a larger audience (e.g. the Stanford Coursera Machine Learning course that didn't want to assume any calculus or linear algebra background), which made them into more of a pointless brand advertisement than an actual learning resource.

> pointless brand advertisement

I understand what you mean, but I disagree it's mostly or pure branding.

I'd argue that even watered down versions can be useful as a bridge to more advanced courses and material, provided you have access to both.

Personally, I benefited from that ML course by Andrew Ng, because I got the vocabulary and introductory math knowledge to proceed to courses and textbooks on linear algebra. It wasn't the only thing that helped, sure, but it helped.

There were also other STEM and non-STEM MOOCs which brought me free knowledge I probably would've never pursued or paid for otherwise.

I'd definitely support that.

On the flip side, that'd require many professors and other participants in universities to rethink the role of a university degree, which proves to be much more difficult.

Reminds me of something I wrote a year ago https://praveshkoirala.com/2024/11/21/the-democratization-of...

>I've even heard professors say they don't want to share their slides or record their lectures, because it's their copyright.

No, it's because they don't want people to find out they've been reusing the same slide deck since 2004

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