Comment by SamuelAdams
19 days ago
Not just YouTube. MIT has an open course system that is available to anyone, for free, from actually employed MIT professors, lecturing real courses [1]. I went to a state university that basically copied Pearson slides and books into a course with minimal adjustments.
Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.
And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/
I think that's the biggest disruption of all, and goes well under the radar. Universities were originally guilds of students who hired masters of fields to profess their knowledge.
Now anyone with a computer connected to the internet can have access to the best lectures in the world. People talk a lot about employment, diploma mill mentality, student and professor ethics in this thread.
But I think the silent revolution, one that has nothing to do with AI, is that nowadays anyone can learn and acquire basically any knowledge based skills they might want. I have always lived by the maxim "don't let school get in the way of your education". And I also think that education is a life long journey. Fretting about the state of complex systems is an exercise in futility. Educating oneself has never been easier and I love it!
> And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
That is shameful. Instead of doing that, they should have given that out upfront and then spend the class discussing it and helping those who still had doubts/questions.