Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

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Now would be a really good time to make sure there are copies of those elsewhere. MIT is not wealthy like Harvard sort of is (long story), and in all cases one needs to remember that the vast majority of endowment money is earmarked (somehow donors trust college administrators only so much, and then there's Princeton).

OCW is now in maintenance mode as far as I can tell, with terrible gaps in offerings, like 2nd term bio- and organic chemistry but no 1st term offering, and given the astounding breath of the demand, there's every chance a very large fraction of MIT's video and audio offerings will simply go dark, and future production burdened by red tape (which MIT students do not respond to well...).

Especially since the lawsuit demands quality captioning. Granted, there examples on their web page are awful, then again they're nothingburgers: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... at least if my understanding of the lack of real power of the President of Liberia is correct, and it says something that they put Lady Gaga being welcomed by Harvard students right after it. If this is the best they can come up with....

Not that I know any SJW deaf types right now, but if I did, they'd be treated to the one of the very few bits of sign language I know :-(.

Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.

MIT's endowment is 12b. That's a ways off Harvard's outlier of 36b, but if they're paying out 5% a year as a benchmark, that's $600m a year just off the endowment. Not being as rich as Bill Gates does not make one not wealthy if one still has over a billion dollars. One can not imagine it would be that hard for the folks at MIT to put together a program to crowdsource quality captioning. (Let alone some kind of "technological" solution, isn't text to speech a thing these days?)

Do you deny my statement that "the vast majority of" MIT's endowment is earmarked, so it cannot arbitrarily reprogram that money to this purpose? From the insider's viewpoint, MIT has not been "wealthy" since the end Cold War and got hard hit by the Great Recession, although I haven't checked details as of the last few years.

This has entered the legal arena. It's not hard to imagine the red tape of the remedies of a settlement or lawsuit loss being significant, very possibly exceeding the costs of the closed captioning (e.g. mandatory QA). In this context, the idea this quality problem could be addressed by crowd-sourcing is patently ludicrous.

Does anyone have a better solution than Google, which is where the cited bad captions apparently come from? Yeah, it's "a thing" alright, a thing that just handed MIT a nasty, no win lawsuit.

The hallmark of a successful development program is to simultaneously convince you of two things (1) the school is of the highest quality and (2) it is drastically underfunded. Yes endowment funds are earmarked, but in most cases they're going to fund things that would need to be funded anyway (scholarships, professorships, center & department expenses). One of the strengths of a large endowment is that it increases the share of general funds that are discretionary, giving them room to do things that alumni don't get excited about, like cutting the grass and (yes) making campuses accessible to those with different physical capabilities.

But, in any case leaving aside MIT's 5th largest endowment, it's only one of the factors in determining whether a school is well off. One could also look, say, at the budget. Or research funding.

By just about any metric one could imagine, MIT is one of the richest schools in the nation.

As I said, inside viewpoint. I don't look at anything the development program produces besides the occasional headline. Instead, I actually worked at MIT job in 1980, and a job in the end of the '80s (IT). I keep up with contacts and friends from those jobs, plus I just plain hung around the campus for a dozen year period including those jobs, and I know how it is at "the sharp end of the spear".

Like helping to allocate a fixed budget and running requisitions through the always skeptical procurement office. So I know MIT didn't switch from cleaning every bathroom every day to "frequent cleaning" because it had a large surplus of funds, and that it's been hurting as the Cold War ended, and now with the Great Recession.

But you're in part moving the goalposts. No one is denying MIT doesn't have a lot of money, we're discussing whether it has such an unrestricted surplus it can all of a sudden properly caption all the video it formally publishes. In a legal regime that'll make that all the more expensive and time and energy consuming. And what will have to be sacrificed to do this, aside from all the videos that will go dark and stay dark.

Especially in the case of the targeted OCW, which most certainly doesn't have the money to do this, and based on its ability to fund raise after it fulfilled its original mandate, would have trouble doing this, and would also certainly have to initially remove all its videos after an adverse outcome. Heck, is MIT going to have to institute policy of cost recovery to cover the expenses of making sure no video gets them into further trouble?

Another thing to consider is that Harvard and MIT were chosen as the initial targets for the obvious reasons. Just how much will the world be enriched when this filters down to every college in the US? Like the one my family shares a property boundary with, which prides itself in providing a low cost education and rents out textbooks. Right now it's very cheap for them to put video on the web. If you're successful, that'll end.

Luckily, folks who care about making things accessible for those with disabilities have already won (god forbid something like the ADA getting passed today), so I don't actually need to fight this battle. These videos will be captioned, MIT will not go broke (or stop putting up new things). Set up a tickle file, one year from today, see how it all looks.

OCW is insanely expensive, and sponsors got bored with it after a decade.

I don't think they "got bored" so much as OCW fulfilled its limited mandate modulo gaps like I mentioned, which require cooperation from the departments in question, which they implied might be the cause when I emailed them (it was a form letter so who knows, but at least the chemistry department isn't swimming in money for this sort of thing, especially with all the service courses they have to teach, with biochemistry being a joint class with the biology department).

And of course the significant albeit limited success of OCW was part of the motivation to create edX.

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