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Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

512 points| berkeleyarchive | 9 years ago | reply

Tomorrow UC Berkeley is removing all of their lecture videos from Youtube. Thousands of hours of content will be lost to the public. (This has already been discussed at length on HN.)

I'm in the process of archiving some of the most important Computer Science courses, mainly for my own benefit, but I intend to make them publically available. (This is a throwaway account b/c I don't want to run afoul of any legal issues.)

What I have so far:

- CS61 Series (61A, 61B, and 61C)

- CS162 Operating Systems (Kubiatowicz)

- CS164 Programming Languages & Compilers (Hillfinger)

- CS186 Intro to Database Systems (Hellerstein)

148 comments

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[+] toomuchtodo|9 years ago|reply
All of it has already been archived (EDIT: thanks to the hard work and quick response of ArchiveTeam and /r/DataHoarder).

[edit: link to Archive Team project-specific page removed to reduce excessive load; replaced with Archive.is link below]

https://archive.is/D1Ail

[+] developer2|9 years ago|reply
Out of curiosity, if Berkeley requests that the Archive Team remove their videos, I assume they would comply? There must be a reason they want their videos taken down, and could presumably use the threat of legal action to have them removed from any archives? Why choose to take down videos being hosted at no cost on YouTube if you're willing to allow them to be "pirated" (aka preserved) elsewhere?
[+] bogomipz|9 years ago|reply
If you looked at the "Downloaded" column on that link most of the CS courses haven't been downloaded. Also when I click on a link like I am redirected to youtube where the content is as of now still available. Am I missing something?
[+] vpribish|9 years ago|reply
Thank you, toomuchtodo. This did seem like the sort of thing that just had to have already been done.
[+] Dangeranger|9 years ago|reply
Has anyone been able to use youtube-dl to archive the CS61B-2016-Spring? 'Computer Science 61B, 002 - Spring 2015'

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-XXv-cvA_iDD4nnsfVIq...

Unfortunately this content appears to be throwing HTTP 500 server errors while downloading according to the verbose output.

If anyone has that content I'd be interested to know what worked for you.

[+] sillysaurus3|9 years ago|reply
> Resource Limit Is Reached

Unfortunately the site seems to be overloaded.

[+] SilasX|9 years ago|reply
I deeply apologize if this is off topic, but this request highlights an issue with the original debate, where posters were tripping over each others to express indignation about Berkeley releasing these videos without disability accommodations, reiterating the same arguments for the ADA, and asserting that those same considerations apply here.

If you thought the judgment against Berkeley was justified-- that they couldn't give away these videos for free without e.g. subtitles -- are you equally against this effort? Because it accomplishes the exact same thing: the availability of some useful education videos that are unusable by (some) people with disabilities.

If you're not, how do you reconcile that? Your position seems to be something bizarre like:

A) "Yeah, Berkeley should release free, deaf-unusable videos, but gosh darnit, they better well do it through back channels, because we need to respect the disabled."

B) "It's great to release the videos, as long as someone other than Berkeley endorses and/or hosts them, because we need to respect the disabled."

I just don't see a way to reconcile them, and yet I get the impression that some posters here do hold both views (the judgment was justified, and this effort should not be halted/is good).

Edit: Here are the discussions I am referring to, courtesy of BenElgar:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764

[+] lordCarbonFiber|9 years ago|reply
I think the crux of the matter, and opinion of the majority of people in those threads, was that the decision against Berkeley was decidedly unjustified.

To me, so long as the university provides resources to its disable students, which I assume they do given they're not involved in an even bigger lawsuit, what they provide to the public is community service. Denying billions of people across the world access to quality information because of the needs of maybe a million deaf in the US is ridiculous and a loss for the world.

[+] Zungaron|9 years ago|reply
The ADA already reconciles these viewpoints, by allowing for people who would otherwise be in violation to claim exemption because complying would cause an undue burden. So we shouldn't expect a random person on the internet to pay for captioning 20,000 videos, because that would be (presumably) ridiculously outside their means. On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that a university that could recently afford a $400 million dollar renovation to their athletics stadium could afford to caption 20,000 videos.
[+] garysieling|9 years ago|reply
I think this would be a good project for crowdsourcing, because as you point out, it's something many people do care a lot about, so it ought to be possible to recruit some enthusiastic volunteers.

For all the talk about these types of issues, it seems to be very rare for tech conference videos to be captioned (presumably due to cost).

You can see here, something like 800 out of 18,000 videos from tech conferences are captioned:

https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&type1=Conference&talk_type...

[+] steven777400|9 years ago|reply
I'm not involved in the previous discussion at all, but given my limited knowledge of the facts, I'd propose a solution like: "Berkeley should keep these videos up, and work to add subtitles and accessibility features to them in a reasonable timeframe, consistent with funding and personnel availability."
[+] derekp7|9 years ago|reply
You also have c) they had already released the videos, so now they need to follow the law and make them accessible.

My personal feeling on this -- if the videos were created as part of their primary mission, then they would be required to add accessibility. But it seems that these videos were a side effect of their primary mission, which is providing education to enrolled people. In that case, appropriate accommodations were most likely made in those specific classes, where needed.

[+] closeparen|9 years ago|reply
I hold both views.

The subtitle requirement doesn't apply to members of the general public. It applies to large institutions which know better, and have the resources to comply.

If Berkeley is embarrassed, some other university takes the time to subtitle its video content in the future to avoid a similar mess, and the public gets to keep the Berkeley videos, that's the best possible outcome short of Berkeley captioning its videos and continuing to host them.

The point isn't "if people with disabilities can't have it, no one can." That's just an unfortunate cost of enforcement. The point is to apply some mild coercion to make more of the world accessible to people with disabilities, and if this debacle has that effect, it's working as intended.

[+] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
> deaf-unusable videos

Not just deaf people. The video was inaccessible to a wide range of people.

If private citizens want to take the content and torrent it that's fine.

If Berkeley want to release video they should obey the nearly 30 year old law --and their own policies-- and make the content accessible, especially when they're taking both fees from students and government grants.

[+] ucb_throwaway|9 years ago|reply
As a former UC Berkeley student, I just want to add that besides the public lecture videos, there are also many private, unlisted course videos on YouTube from the last couple years (after it became an issue). The Archive Team has missed these videos as they're only accessible via UC Berkeley's student portal if you're a student in the class. The Archive Team and current/former students need to work together here to retrieve the private YouTube playlists and download the videos.
[+] throwaway729|9 years ago|reply
Be careful? The copyright and licensing status of those videos is probably less clear-cut than stuff that was explicitly released under a permissive license.
[+] brandon272|9 years ago|reply
It was mentioned on reddit as well that there are videos on iTunes that are not on YouTube and that the iTunes videos will be removed as well.
[+] rapfaria|9 years ago|reply
This should definitely be mentioned on /r/DataHoarder
[+] huma|9 years ago|reply
Not CS related, but I've found these courses to be of great value:

- Sociology 150A (Robb Willer) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edfKMAePWfE

- Geography C110 (Richard Walker) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYR5PdPZ_w0&list=PL4rxxS6x1H...

- Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents (Richard Muller) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0

There's also an audio course on Buddhist Psychology by Eleanor Rosch, if you're interested. Now seems to be available only on iTunes.

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca...

[+] nsrose7224|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sure which of the following are actually available on Youtube, but here are the courses I enjoyed the most and I think are the most valuable as a CS major:

- CS161 Security (Wagner preferably)

- CS189 Machine Learning (Shewchuk)

- CS170 Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems

Not a comprehensive list, just my favorites.

[+] xyle|9 years ago|reply
That is a great list to have so far! On top of that, I have to highly recommend CS168: Internet Architecture (preferably with Scott Shenker), CS 161: Computer Security (with either Wagner, or Weaver), and CS169: Software Engineering (with Armando Fox, also available on EdX). These are the 3 courses that were most influential on my Undergrad experience (on top of the 61 series and 162)
[+] AnimalMuppet|9 years ago|reply
> I'm in the process of archiving some of the most important Computer Science courses, mainly for my own benefit, but I intend to make them publically available. (This is a throwaway account b/c I don't want to run afoul of any legal issues.)

Um, hate to break it to you, but you're not going to run into legal issues for saying that you're going to grab archives and make them publicly available. You're going to run into trouble for actually making them publicly available (if the license doesn't permit that). The only thing you change by using a throwaway account is that the legal trouble isn't associated with your main HN account.

[+] CalChris|9 years ago|reply
Dunno if CS 161, Computer Security, is available but it's a great course. Wagner or Weaver both have their points.

CS 70 should make the list but the lecture notes are enough.

Strongly prefer Kubi for OS or pretty much anything.

[+] Abundnce10|9 years ago|reply
I've been looking for CS 161 but it doesn't look like it's available unfortunately.
[+] pavanky|9 years ago|reply
Would it not have been better for Berkley to reach out to the community to ask them to help improve captioning if money was an issue ? Is this not a legal way to solve this problem instead of taking it down for lack of funds ?
[+] euyyn|9 years ago|reply
Berkeley's response was actually that they'll rather use the funds to create content that's both accessible and not old. So they do have the funds, and are using them in a smarter way.
[+] yourapostasy|9 years ago|reply
The proximate cause of this removal is Gallaudet University [1] [2].

What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf of their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is free, but that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into the real story behind their protest? I don't want to excoriate them without knowing the whole story, it could have been just someone's doh! moment turned into a really bad outcome.

I know there are closed-captioning format standards. Perhaps someone can create a site that runs closed captioning underneath YouTube videos, with the closed captioning supplied by volunteers (kind of like how closed captioning was done by anime fans)? Hook it up to a GitHub backend so closed caption data can be refined by anyone, with appropriate sidebar discussions. Hook it up to Google Translate to generate Braille and foreign translations of the hand-curated closed captioning, and let users refine the auto-generated translations. Then prevail upon the DOJ and Gallaudet University to give this time to develop instead of hammering on UC Berkeley, and let Creative Commons-licensed closed captioning fill in the content everywhere for all access-challenged students, for all content? Google might be interested to use this as a corpus for Deepmind.

Gallaudet University could have pioneered a solution and become the world leader in automated accessible content generation working in partnership with Google Deepmind, for example. That would have brought in way, way more funding through licensing than this short-sighted approach they are taking now. If Gallaudet University established a CS focus upon this, it would draw in top global talent for a variety of specialties. HAL-like accurate automated lip-reading coming out of this, with even more accuracy when using mic arrays? Yes, please; you get something like that even 90% accurate and you just gave a mindgasm to every meeting-organizer in the world who wants meeting notes taken. And as much as you all hate meetings, if you had a near-irrefutable better-than-stenographer CYA from meeting notes just once, I guarantee you would love that mechanism, increased meetings frequency or no.

This is a darkening of the Net and education in general, and it should not stand. Unless the reporting on this development is simply not including their side of the story, that Gallaudet University is not front and center of this issue trying to get ahead of the outcome by seeking win-win solutions should be making them a pariah on the Net and in the education world. Gallaudet University pursuing a perfect-is-enemy-of-good tactic likely has not considered that they just pulled free education for hundreds of millions of young minds in the developing nations who cannot afford anything close to a world-class education, but have family and friends willing to translate for them. That's unnecessary.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-...

[2] http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/09/government-over-regu...

UPDATE: I glanced at the YouTube API, and it seems the IFrame Player API supports returning playback status and elapsed seconds [3], so closed captions running underneath an iframe'd video and dynamically responding to the state of the video appears feasible. Only a 5-minute glance, though, so I might have missed other bits for analyzing for feasibility.

[3] https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference#P...

[+] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
> What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf of their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is free, but that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into the real story behind their protest?

It's all in the DoJ letter. https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

It's a bit worrying that you have such strong opinions when you haven't read the DoJ letter yet.

> Stacy Nowak, a member of NAD, is a professor and PhD student at Gallaudet University and she is deaf. Ms. Nowak would like to avail herself of what she believes is the increasingly frequent use of video and audio-based scholarship. Ms. Nowak teaches communication courses at Galludet, including Introduction to Communication and Nonverbal Communication. She would like to use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes, including the UC BerkeleyX course, “Journalism for Social Change,” but cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley’s online content were accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her lectures.

Berkeley is a public institution, offering educational services, under the ADA.

Berkeley has a legal duty to make accessible this content, unless it would be unduly financially burdensome, or unless it would change the nature of what they do.

Berkeley has some policies around accessibility. They were not following those policies.

Berkeley were not just discriminating against people with hearing impairment, but also people with visual impairment and people with manual disability.

Berkeley chose to remove all the video rather than i) make it accessible during creation or ii) pay to make it accessible after creation.

Don't forget the law is 27 years old. Most of these videos are 10 - 5 years old.

[+] citrusx|9 years ago|reply
I really hate to say this, but I think that the "darkening of the net" is the intent. There are far too many people there who subscribe to the "Deaf Persons as a separate race" idea, and look at sticking a thumb in the eye of the non-deaf to be a Good Thing.

I really hope I'm wrong.

[+] ilyaeck|9 years ago|reply
How/where are you planning on making them publicly available? I suppose UC Berkeley might actually turn a blind eye if one where to simply repost them on YouTube - because UC meant for them to be public in the first place. Alternatively, maybe repost on Vimeo?