As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching.
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
> Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Does anyone remember what happened to UC Berkeley? They had a lot of their courses recorded and uploaded to youtube; an absolute joy. Then, some [beep] sued them for not making the recording accessible enough, i.e. not providing captions alongside the recordings. And they had to take down all their published courses! Because if someone cannot make use of those courses, then no-one can! Such a shame! Especially considering how these days, captions can be generated automatically for anyone who really needs them.
It's going to get worse, ADA Title II updates require that by April 2026 all PDFs and documents be used by UCB be accessible to the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. I expect a lot of third-party content currently hosted on University of California websites will go away.
Machine transcriptions are obviously better than they used to be. But requiring perfect human transcriptions in this day and age would IMO be unreasonable for most purposes.
Certainly machine transcriptions are used these days for purposes that most intelligent people would judge to be perfectly reasonable.
This was free content. The end result is that the content was made inaccessible to everyone, adding zero benefit to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
People really believe this. And also if you mention other disabilities that affect a similar ratio to the one they care about, ie 0.16% of people, they'll say it's too expensive and doesn't affect enough people. Like what if I want this content to be consumable by people who have such heavy learning disabilities that the whole content would need to be 20x as long and explained much more step by step?
They were uploading these for free. The end result of the videos being taken down is that they are now even more inaccessible to that 4% than they were before.
Making things more accessible is a worthy goal, but the world is imperfect and making things better requires resources.
This is exactly why we can't have nice things in this brand new world... there's always a guardian of ethics, of what's right and what's supposed to be done so as not to upset absolutely anyone...
Yes but it's stupid to force them to do it. If the state wants to demand this the state can pay for it. To hide free knowledge just because of a few specific pet disabilities... The content is also not accessible to someone with serious enough learning disabilities for example. Should they be forced to create an accessible version of that?
This is really a tragedy. Make millions of people suffer harm because 1 person cant be accomodated is about as pure an example of "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" as i can think.
There is no malicious intent here. Why arent these documents grandfathered in? It simply makes no sense.
You realize it would cost a significant resources to make the “accommodations” you are suggesting? Money, despite what you may believe, doesn’t grow on trees. Given the range of worthy competing interests where the money could be spent, the university likely had no practical choice but to take it offline, lest it face the bad press and wrath of Progressives.
You remind me of people who insist every single new apartment must be ADA compliant instead of a reasonable percentage throughout the city. Another example is banning SROs on the grounds they are “inhumane”. The moral purity results in less housing and forcing people to live in the cars or on the street.
Our society is better when the things that are available are available to everyone, not just the privileged. I don't see why accommodations for the disabled are considered some unnecessary burden; they should be considered a cost of doing business, for everyone who does business.
This wasn't business. There were no profits to divert into making better subtitles.
And the ratio of effort between making a recording versus making a recording and then manually subtitling it is completely out of whack compared to the ratio you have in full produced works. There's a reasonable level of accommodation, and the reasonable level is below a doubling in costs.
I'm someone that would significantly raise the subtitling requirements on youtube if I could. But in this case I just don't feel it.
You're missing important context, which is that they were required by (federal) law to provide said accommodation, and they failed to do it (some would say they chose not to do it). It was easier (cheaper) to pull the plug.
Don't blame the litigant. If you don't like it, change federal law.
They got sued for not having subtitles… no thanks. I think I’ll blame the chucklefucks that thought, “Oh an opportunity for a quick buck” and resulted in everyone losing a valuable resource.
It's not about money it's about making sure things are accessible. The ADA is one of the reasons America is more accessible then Europe. Lawsuits are the enforcement mechanism
For context: I have cerebral palsy. Play the smallest fiddle for me, it only affects my left hand and slightly my left foot. But I’ve been a part time fitness instructor, properly conditioned I have run decently (10 minute mile) up to a 15K before my slight favoring of my right leg takes it’s toll and I’ve been a gym rat since 1990 and I just left the gym.
But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.
Edit: Just realized the library discussion was in another thread - but the discussion was still with you so I'm keeping it in this comment.
> So how did that work out for the hypothetical “disabled person”?
He didn't have access before, and he doesn't have access now. Nothing is worse for him.
It's not his responsibility to provide the service to others. It is the library's, and they clearly failed and are rightfully blamed for no one having access. If I were a normal person in the town, I would blame them, not the person filing the lawsuit.
If the library shut down because they had clear mold issues they refused to pay to fix, would you blame the immunocompromised, at risk person who filed the lawsuit? Or would you say the library should get its act together and provide a safe/healthy environment?
Imagine a school shutting down because they cannot afford all these new colored students that they could exclude before. Are you going to blame the colored students for insisting on their rights?
This is basic Civil Rights 101. You can't use the excuse of "we don't have money" to discriminate, which UCBerkeley was clearly doing.
> Now they nor anyone else has access to the free content.
Nothing is free. The library patron paid for it via taxes, as did everyone else. Just as everyone pays federal taxes, as did the person in another state who sued UC Berkeley. He's paying, and not getting what he is owed.
If you don't like it, just don't take federal funds. Many organizations' web sites are inaccessible, and that's totally OK and legal.
Did the federal funds cover making it accessible? Was the person suing a student or prospective student of UC Berkeley who couldn’t get in because of accessibility?
If the student had been blind and deaf should they hace flown someone out to personally communicate with them like was done with Helen Keller?
> Did the federal funds cover making it accessible?
All federal funds that go to universities have strings attached. One of them is the requirement that all services to the public must be accessible. Not "try to be" or "make a good effort". It's up to the university to budget appropriately.
As a faculty member, a big percentage of any research grant I get goes straight to the department - I cannot use it for my research. It's up to the department to use the money appropriately, and if they're not budgeting for accessibility, it's on them.
> Was the person suing a student or prospective student of UC Berkeley who couldn’t get in because of accessibility?
For someone arguing so passionately, perhaps you should actually go learn something about the case?
> If the student had been blind and deaf should they hace flown someone out to personally communicate with them like was done with Helen Keller?
Great question. What does the law require for such a person?
Many interest groups in the US are for hire. Meaning, if you don't like a piece of upcoming legislation, you can give them a donation and they'll find out a way the upcoming legislation hurts their demographic. These groups have overwhelmingly passive members, who don't run the organization in any meaningful way.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
> It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It's a convenient narrative. Here's another one: Senior administrator at the university doesn't like the project. It costs money to provide as it is, and money is always tight at a public university. They should be more focused on income generating patents (which, BTW, UC Berkeley is/was good at). And now they want us to spend even more money? Let's kill the project.
I spent a long time at universities, and I also worked for 1.5 years in the university's disability division, so I somewhat know the needs of the disabled. Part of that division's role was "policing" professors' course pages (albeit only when a student complained), so I'm familiar with the territory. Our position was clear: It's the law.
I also know how university administrator's think - they rarely like initiatives meant for the public good for free.
Finally: How much money did they make suing UC Berkeley? Did anyone (other than the lawyers) make money out of it? Why are people so certain this was a money grabbing lawsuit?
If I wrote something for my own use and decided to open source it and then someone hypothetically decided to sue me because it wasn’t accessible, I would say f%%%. them too and take it down.
> If I wrote something for my own use and decided to open source it and then someone hypothetically decided to sue me because it wasn’t accessible, I would say f%%%. them too and take it down.
The difference is that they won't win in court. There's no law requiring you to make your open source work accessible - unless that open source work was part of a project for which you got federal grants.
Sorry, but it's clear that many commenters to this thread no almost nothing about what happened, and are merely engaging in outrage mania.
In the real world, though, when people ask for grant money, they justify how the money will be used. If you didn't put a line item for accessibility, and didn't budget for it, it's on you.
If a city has a public library, but refuses to build a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator to upper floors, and doesn't provide reasonable alternatives to these deficiencies, they can (and should) get sued. If the city then throws up their hand and says "Too expensive" and shuts down the library (everyone suffers), I will not be siding with the library.
But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect. Should they also be forced to take down the website if the speaker didn’t speak perfect English?
> But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect.
This is a falsehood. The complaint was that some videos had no transcription at all.
There were other complaints, BTW - it wasn't just subtitles. There were complaints about blind people not being able to read the docs.
Edit: I think one of the (multiple) complaints was poor transcription. What I meant by "falsehood" was actually referring to an earlier comment that said something to the effect of "they provided subtitles". In some cases they did not provide subtitles.
Just doing a little research - I haven’t looked too deeply into- Google live caption has been built into Chrome since 2021 and there have been third party tools for accessibility since 2016.
But the overall question, is the world a better place now that the information isn’t available to anyone?
> By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word.
I'll reiterate my comment earlier: Most people in this thread don't seem to have any idea how any of this works.
No - if someone cannot see, the law doesn't say eliminate visual material. It's more like "Provide alternative means for them to understand the same concepts (while keeping the same material)."
There are standards on what accommodations to provide for which disabilities. This isn't something everyone has to figure out on their own. If the standards dictate something for people who are both blind and deaf, it's because it is not technically onerous to provide for them.
I don't know if the standards do for this case, though.
> This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.
What I find to be bad faith is people skirting around the issue that the problem (if any), is not those who complained, but the law. This isn't an isolated case. Both Harvard and MIT were also sued. And just like Berkeley, both ultimately settled. If 3 of the top universities can't fight this, it means that if you want change, lobby to change the law. Start looking into how these universities are pushing to change the law. If they aren't, you'll get a good sense of why these laws exist.
Your argument is that someone sued Berkeley for posting free education materials online purely in the name of accessibility and not to make a quick buck?
Free education provided at zero profit to Berkeley, to great benefit to the public, and it was just the wholesome desire for subtitles that made the case?
Yeah, and without subtitles, the course content is not accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing... which the law says it has to be. UC Berkeley decided not to make their content accessible, and when someone complained, they took it all apart rather than making a reasonable (and legally required) accommodation. I guess I don't see why I'd blame the person filing the lawsuit here. UC Berkeley could have just... put up subtitles.
It had subtitles. The demand was better subtitles, and the project had barely any budget.
While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.
The person could have volunteered to write the subtitles themselves or, if they were deaf, to hire someone or even ask someone to volunteer to write subtitles. Or any other number of solutions.
To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.
Almost my entire education has been OJT (On the Job Training). I'm a high school dropout, with a G.E.D. I've spent my entire life, looking up the noses of folks that just assume they are better than me. Gets a bit grating, but the plus side is, is that I have to prove myself, over, and over.
Besides that annoyance, it's been excellent. Directing my own learning has been amazing. Having to prove myself, over and over, and over again, has taught me to deliver results, because no one is willing to front me anything, or give me the benefit of the doubt. Delivery is my "at rest" state, and that kind of thing is hard to teach (Play A Boy Named Sue, by Johnny Cash).
What you talk about works well for people like me (and you, from the sound of it), but a lot of folks need more structure. A lot of institutions also need that paper. There are many doors that are closed to people like us.
My first formal school was a fly-by-night tech school, created to milk the GI Bill, after Vietnam. The school has long since, fallen to dust, but it was exactly what I needed, at the time. It taught me structure, troubleshooting, and problem-solving. When I left, I was ready to immediately jump into the deep end.
I like the idea of vocation-oriented post-K12 schooling, including things like union apprenticeships.
The problem is that, in the US, these aren't really supported by "The Establishment," so we tend to get rather dodgy outfits (like the one I attended).
I have heard that German University is highly vocation-oriented. I've been impressed by many of the Germans with whom I've worked. I feel that they are extremely results-driven. That may be because of the particular company that I worked for, and the types of engineers that our field attracts, though.
Tertiary education in Germany is pretty much a continuum. On one end, you have "Berufsakademien" that offer bachelor's degrees with integrated vocational training – you need to find the employer yourselves, they pay your fees and some salary that you can live off (more or less). On the other end, there's Ivory Tower Academia where no one cares about what happens outside of the classroom. And there is everything in between those two poles.
I remember one night my dad drove up to a building with three letters on it. Walked up to some lady behind a desk inside the front door, and after arguing for a bit, pulled out his checkbook and wrote on it, passing the check to her. I watched as he turned and walked back to the car looking a sad mixture of dejected and pissed.
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
I learn well this way. You learn well this way. However, the big revelation from the early experiments with online courses and MOOCs is that most people don’t.
Fundamentals of math, history, physics, and other core topics aren’t changing except maybe for some context on current applications (e.g. how math applies to machine learning, how historical context relates to current events). Those same online course recordings you watched are still valid. There is some room for improvement with new recordings with new gear and better audio, but it’s marginal.
Once those courses are recorded and released, we don’t need to keep doing it every year over and over again. The material is out there, it’s just not popular to self-learn at a self-directed pace.
You need forced exercises, you need grading, you need something of a schedule. Not to say people can't do it. But, especially for difficult material, even a lot of motivated people won't.
I mean I remember what undergrad (and grad school) was like and I'm pretty sure doing that independently and optionally would be tough.
Just look at success for adults learning the things adults commonly take up: languages or musical instruments. There is some good results, but mostly you find people who can say "Hello, how are you" and no more; or they can play some simple songs but nothing major. It takes hours and hours of practice / study time to learn anything hard. You can find a lot of community ed classes that will bring you to about that level in many subjects, but it is hard to find anyone willing to put in the hours needed to learn something to more than a surface level.
There are a lot of activities that you can get the basics of pretty quickly given some natural abilities/talents/interest.
But most adults won't have the time or inclination to spend hundreds of hours (and probably money) on often rather boring exercises to reach the next level of an activity like playing an instrument.
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
MIT OpenCourseWare still upload a lot of their lectures to YouTube for free (been doing it for decades) and pretty sure some other universities do the same.
The main problem with online courses is lack of "direction" and engagement (which both Udemy and Coursera don't solve)
Stanford's Youtube channel is also a goldmine. There's actually a lot of professors that put their lectures on Youtube, you just have to look (or watch enough that the algorithm finds them for you).
I find the Stanford channel a bit hard to navigate, MIT has a dedicated channel for the courses and another one for the other stuff, I wish Stanford did the same.
The same applies to Harvard too
> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
Maybe improving the world is a good idea regardless of whether it's a viable model?
Anyway, in this case, the cost to the university is quite low and there's no real loss of income, as the real value the vast majority of people pay for is clearly in the status that comes from being there in person and getting the diploma.
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.