Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co...
by sp332 on Friday February 13, 2015 @10:43AM
(#9044867)
If MIT is all about giving more privilege to the privileged, why did they start the OCW project in the first place? I submit that MIT actually wants these videos to be as accessible as possible, including captions. This is supported by the fast the many of the videos already have captions.
Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co...
by hga on Friday February 13, 2015 @11:11AM
(#9045029)
Indeed, and one of its initial and still strong missions is to bring the benefits of rapidly developing science and engineering to the world. As far as I know, the single biggest boost to health and material well being in the US occurred in the post-Civil War period, not much later when we got "modern medicine" as in antibiotics (although what they could often pull off with antiseptics and infection control was amazing, read a history of the Mayo brothers if you're interested).
But we're talking about gross ingratitude here. That OCW is not perfect in this is a crime (literally, unless you think they can get away with ignoring a civil legal settlement or judgement), with a punishment requiring either removing the videos or spending a lot of money it and MIT doesn't have to perfect them under an inflexible legal mandate.
I again repeat, this is not going to end well. Especially for the truly deaf people this is ostensibly being done for.
Every undergraduate who's ever attended has been rather "privileged" in being able to do serious math (although in the post-Civil War beginning a common track had seniors ending with the calculus). Nowadays you must at minimum be ready to learn the calculus and do calculus based mechanics and E&M ... at the MIT pace.
MIT (and CalTech) undergraduates have to learn at a much faster pace than is the norm, a lot of material in a fairly compressed schedule of 13 weeks of instruction if I remember correctly as of the '80s. That's not believed to be good for most STEM students, but we at least believe there's a place in the world for institutions like MIT and CalTech. One meme is that a fair amount of what you learn will be obsolete before your career is over, but there's merit in learning how to learn difficult stuff quickly.