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Nigerian engineering students’ favorite teachers are Indian YouTubers
- ArunRaja 3y agoLeap frogging of knowledge.
- hewlett 3y agothis Canadian engineering student's favourite teachers are Indian YouTubers
- kube-system 3y agoI've always felt Canada was wildly overrepresented with great YouTubers.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoI'll certainly check out some of the channels here but my experience with Indian-originating tutorials on YouTube is that they are almost uniformly terrible. There are a few good ones but so rare that if I see an Indian name I'll tend to skip over it. My interests when I look tend to be about computing and mathematics. They may be of higher quality on other subjects.
- gourabmi 3y ago[flagged]
- TheFreim 3y ago[flagged]
- yawpitch 3y ago[flagged]
- TheFreim 3y agoNames are often associated with various groups, trying to imply that this doesn't matter is disingenuous. I will continue to avoid low-quality tech content through various heuristics.
- yawpitch 3y agoThis particular heuristic will — self evidently, based on the article — result in you both missing a lot of very high-quality tech content while also revealing yourself as more than a bit bigoted… but hey, more power to you.
- TheFreim 3y agoIt will result in me missing mostly garbage content, occasionally quality content, in exchange for other content which is quality that isn't missed. It's not like I just decided one day to avoid content in this fashion, you waste enough time and energy on low quality content and you eventually learn ways to notice and avoid it. > revealing yourself as more than a bit bigoted A man was once asked by a journalist whether or not he was a "racist". His response was as follows, "I've thought about that a lot, and I've concluded that it doesn't matter."
- yawpitch 3y ago
- dmarchand90 3y agoFor me it's been the opposite. Though in my case it's been more Indian professors who often give extremely good (though sometimes perhaps a bit dry) lectures.
- screye 3y ago> Indian-originating tutorials on YouTube The article discusses NPTEL. For most of its duration, NPTEL videos were straight recordings of classroom videos at India's top IITs. I have found their rigor & instruction to be at part with MIT OCW (which was and still is the gold standard). The instruction style is more mono tone and less interactive. But, neither are negatives when watching a youtube video.
- javchz 3y agoDepends on what you call quality. Production value or content. In my experience it's true a lot of Indian content can improve their video / audio or script proofreading... But they compensate being the only ones sharing their knowledge in niche areas for free. And when you're lost, I take whatever I have at hand even if it's on 240p with a potato mic, I'm grateful it exists.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoStrictly content. I'm looking to learn not be entertained so good explanations is all I'm after.
- recursive 3y agoSometimes the audio recording is so bad it hinders comprehension. Generally, this is the case where the camera mic is used, and it's set up on the other side of the room. I've encountered a number of tutorial-style videos where there's so much room noise, it's an effort to distinguish the syllables being spoken.
- SadWebDeveloper 3y ago[flagged]
- justsomehnguy 3y agoNigerian reversal (of sorts): Indian vloggers are fullfilling the niche which Nigerians can't. Of course it's always a question of how good the presenter and the course and how good are students actually learn the topic from these videos, but at least people themselves praise them so there are definitely a sense of gratitude.
- yawpitch 3y agoWhat makes it so that Nigerian presenters _can’t_ while Indian presenters _can_? I’ve certainly seen Nigerians who understand the material well enough to present… is it the means of production? The non-CS skills (editing, audio, etc)? Just straight access to resources?
- justsomehnguy 3y agoIt's not the quality, it's availability of means, for sure. > Just straight access to resources? IMO, as I understand it, it's just that. There are enough people in India who can do these videos, there are not enough people who can do that in Nigeria. And considering YouTube algos.. there are probably when you could had a more 'local' video but which was buried at th page.
- yawpitch 3y agoThat’s a shame. I mean I’d assume — admittedly, as an English-speaking American white dude who never had the slightest difficulty accessing “local” content — that having a presenter you can directly identify with using locally relevant examples (simple things like local currency, pricing, products and names) and adapted to local norms (maybe steering discussions of probability away from gambling or usury in Muslim communities, for example) would really help convert kids at the fringes of confidence / motivation to successful learners, if only by removing the need to translate already unfamiliar material into local / personal relevance. If it were possible to get the small number of Nigerians who can do it to actually do it (maybe by providing a production suite in a box, if physical means of production is the issue), then gaming / overwhelming the algorithms probably isn’t that hard, just by actively encouraging local users to engage with the content actively (driving up the ads watched, and hopefully ignored). With my background I could easily put together the suite in a box, I just haven’t the slightest clue who needs to get that box… that takes local expertise I just don’t have.
- screye 3y agoThe NPTEL videos are a major public good. It is a shame that for the longest time, MIT OCW's CS & Math lectures were the only high-quality course-videos on the internet. Leveraging the IIT system to get 100% course coverage over every possible engineering course is genius. It has democratized education better and earlier than any unicorn. (Coursera, Udacity, etc.). Everything from assignments to It is an indictment of American universities that despite having the funding, resources and technology to do this a lot earlier, it was eventually a 3rd world country that pulled it off. All without any profit motive. "Non-profit universities"?, yeah right. Just take a look at the courses on offer - https://nptel.ac.in/courses https://nptel.ac.in/courses . Every imaginable engineering specialization is on offer, down to the most obscure. University classrooms do not seem to have caught up to just how easy it is to access this information. Most professors do not have the same caliber or flair to do better than the best NPTEL video. I would like to new coursework designed around integrating video lectures of this sort as integral part of engineering instruction, with the in-person professor taking on the role or assistance and disambiguation, rather than being an inferior repeater of the same information.
- autokad 3y agoa lot of great tutorials and education is out there, especially on YouTube. glad others are making use of it today. I was watching the Korean drama 'Dr Cha', and the look on her face when she found out she could watch training videos on anything, and she said something like 'this is a brave new world'.
- pitt1980 3y agoI'm too old to have done this when I went through school, but I suspect a good practice is to go through your syllabus, and but the major unit covered into the youtube search bar. I suspect you get all sorts of parallel presentations of the material in a way that is quite helpful for retention.
- solarkraft 3y agoIt's reached meme status (as in people will make and share the funny pictures about it) in some international western circles, leading me to believe that everyone's favorite teachers are indian. Personally I sometimes find the thick accents hard to deal with, but really, when all other materials let you down, you can count on the indian tutor to cover the topic. Big thanks to all of the (largely indian) internet tutors doing my lecturer's job.
- ren_engineer 3y agoit's actually a strong selective signal for the quality of teaching: If people are willing to put up with the challenge of dealing with an accent it means the quality of the video content itself must be extremely good
- zeku 3y agoWhen I was doing my CS degree I was watching youtube lectures in Hindi(I don't speak Hindi) and following along with what was on the board. I did my degree just before the wave of Indian teachers in English was a thing. Respect to these people.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoWhen I attempted to learn C back in 2016, one of my absolute favorite youtuber teachers was a native Indian (accent n all). His videos were much more detailed and better designed than what was out there at the time. After doing some research on his background, I found out he ended up getting a job at Google and lives in Cali now! Put a smile on my face.
- nodelessness 3y agoMay I know why their accent was relevant in this?
- prmph 3y agoWish him well. But can't help but think... All that talent, wasted helping Google to shove ads more effectively down our throat.
- throwaway33381 3y agoHuh I'm always skeptical of anything that goes viral on twitter, usually theyre marketing campaigns looking at individual youtube videos most dont even have ~25k views. Personally, this looks like a lazy attempt at fake advertising when nigeria does not even have a large twitter presence. As most nigerian are not even online. Nor are they at the level of educational attainment to find anything of remote value from these lectures. The responses in this post as well point towards fraudulent and fake responses in the hopes of generating likely funding for a technology sector in a region that isn't ready for one.