> 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

> 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. I don't understand why this needs to so adversarial but for what it's worth, American universities do already provide videos. You mentioned OCW, but EdX does so too, Berkeley did what NPTEL is doing a decade ago. Many universities do so piecemeal. Remember, that if an entity is a nonprofit, that entity still needs to raise money from somewhere. It needs to show statistics about how impactful its efforts are. The main reason why there isn't more of this is because its educational value as far as we can tell is marginal, pretty close to zero, at best. For example, if a course already exists on OCW, the value of having another course from another university seems very low. Why would someone pay for another archive of a course at another university? Then there are the completion statistics. They show that virtually no one completes MOOCs. OCW and EdX numbers show the same. It's hard to find anyone to give money to these programs. Now, we might be measuring the wrong thing. In the US if you want to study something you will definitely find a university to do it. It could be that there is great value when the baseline you're comparing to is Nigeria. That's just not what US or EU universities look at in terms of numbers. How could they and who would they pitch this to for funding? It's extremely expensive to keep a video archive like this up to date. NPTEL videos contain what in the US would be considered copyright violations on their slides. You cannot imagine how much effort OCW has to go into to avoid this. You simply couldn't do what NPTEL is doing in the US. For what it's worth, I think we should relax IP laws, but it is what it is. I'll say this for the NPTEL archive. The quality is extremely variable. From a few really good courses, to a lot of rather poor ones, to things like the "Modern Computer Vision" course recorded in 2022 that was "modern" in maybe 2013-2014. Also for educational value, I agree with the US numbers. If you look at the most popular youtube videos called out in the article, they're not like the NPTEL archive. Dry courses presented in textbook order. They're much more interactive, much deeper dives, that slowly walk you over some piece of material from different points of view. More like Khan academy than OCW.