Re:Show HN: Khan-dl – Khan Academy Course Downloader
by bladegash on Monday February 15, 2021 @04:47PM
(#26147901)
I think it is a bit naive to think they released those videos out of altruism. It is free marketing for them and a way of distinguishing their brand, funded by students, the state, and the federal government.
They had an office dedicated to helping professors make course materials, to include resources for subtitling course material and QA processes for ensuring accessibility. For whatever reason, the university did not require use of the office and the professors did not use it even though it was there. The DoJ report I linked above has additional information on that.
I may not be remembering accurately, but I am fairly sure the material Berkeley posted on edX at the time was just recordings of their actual lectures given to on-campus students and/or recordings they were making/were made for online classes (that were paid for). In other words, they were not going out of their way to record these lectures specifically for MOOCs.
The courses are not free but the videos are! Releasing publicly available videos is not a requirement in order to receive public funding, it's something extra they did because they could.
> 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.
If the subtitles were already available for students internally, that does change things. But the articles posted by the OP made it sound like it was something they'd need to add.
And adding subtitles to hundreds of hours of lectures really does strike me as unreasonably costly, given that this content was not intended for students paying tuition and did not garner any additional funding.