Comment by ben_w

> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. Some lecturers are also just incompetent with barely any understanding of what they're teaching in the first place - though this probably wouldn't be as big of a problem in better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works

Memories of my degree 20 years ago. We didn't have (many) pre-recorded videos of lectures available to watch whenever we wanted at whatever speed we wanted, the way we do now.

Now there's a good range of lectures given away for free, I'm not sure even the top 10% of lecturers (beyond the best individuals in the world on whichever topic) are adding much value — In theory one could interrupt the lecture to clarify a point, but that's also a thing one can often do alone with the internet.

And that's for the best lecturers. We had some good teachers, but also some bad ones.

The C lectures were fantastic, the practical security sessions were fun (started with ~ "if you've already hacked this WiFi box, please log out so I can show everyone else how to break into it"), etc.

For the bad ones… there was one in my final year where I was using my laptop to record the whole session at 44 kHz (audio only), and the lecturer claimed that motion capture recordings couldn't go for more than a few minutes because that would be "several megabytes" of data. There was another who was giving us an example of formal methods, but they got the proof wrong and didn't notice (and had a voice that meant nobody cared). Another had an impenetrable accent, I might have understood a total of two words in the entire lecture, though I could at least follow the written material projected on the screen.