I don't know why I care. MIT just sounds impressive. I wouldn't say that research skills are not important. For example, the algorithms course at MIT included

I don't know why I care. MIT just sounds impressive. I wouldn't say that research skills are not important. For example, the algorithms course at MIT included a very modern topic on "cache oblivious algorithms", which was developed there just a few years ago by the same professor who taught the course. It would take some years for the other better educators to learn how to teach it. Same with linear algebra, here in Latvia we had a great professor who taught it, but he never mentioned even jpeg compression or any other modern stuff that Gilbert Strang does. We got taught the regular stuff that has been around in linear algebra for 100 years.