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Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

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Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#141

Post by imjustsaying »

Zungaron wrote: post #79
SilasX wrote: post #49

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 cou…

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…

>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.

The blanket assumption that the benefit of captioning those videos is greater than the benefit of everything else that is done with those funds is not reasonable without some really good evidence.

Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#142

Post by wikibob »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #16
et-al wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archive Team seems to be down (maybe from all the requests). If you really value these videos, I'd still download them onto your own computer instead of relying on a third-party hosting. As others have mentioned, youtube-dl is the way to do it and super easy, e.g.: youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-XXv-cvA_iBDyz-ba4yDskqMDY6A1w_c

Archive Team and Archive.org are not the same entity. Archive.org contains the entire UC Berkeley course corpus, provided by Archive Team and /r/DataHoarder/ You are free to help seed the torrents of course containing all of the content.

Can you point to the exact page on Archive.org that has all of the courses?

This appears to be the Berkley page that links to all the available courses: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s

I've checked the various Archive.org links posted so far, and only see a small portion of the content. For example only the 2008 and 2010 versions of CS61A & B appear to be archived.

Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#143

Post by barrkel »

closeparen wrote: post #134
SilasX wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "working as intended" that the material is out there, just a little harder to find and just as disability-incompliant?

The purpose is not to remove material. The purpose is to maximize the set of content accessible to people with disabilities, by encouraging producers to make their content accessible in a way that asking nicely won't. This has been enough of an ordeal that captioning is likely to be taken more seriously in the future. The law has successfully separated Berkeley from its self-interest in the videos (prestige, etc.) It…

Outlawing inaccessible material does not necessarily lead to maximizing accessible material. I think a strong argument could be made to the contrary, in fact. Material could become incrementally more accessible over time with motivated volunteers; outlawed material has no chance to become so.

Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#144

Post by DanBC »

yourapostasy wrote: post #113
DanBC wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?…

The going rate to manually close caption transcribe those 20K videos seems to be missing. Apparently the DOJ did, but did not share that number in the letter, yet charges ahead that doing so would not be "unduly financially burdensome". Back of the envelope: assume an average 60 minutes per video, 20,000 videos. Googling around, I see manual, high-accuracy transcription and captioning goes for about $5-6 per minute,…

Making those 20,000 videos accessible now would be expensive.

But since the law had been in place at least 15 years before these videos were created Berkeley should have just complied with the law, and stopped their employees from lying about complying with the law, when the content was created.

All the videos created before 2015 were "self certified" - someone had to sign a bit of paper to say "I've read the Berkeley stuff on accessibility, and this content is accessible".

> I see far more promise in working on automated transcription

That only fixes the subtitling issue. While in this case the complainant were people with hearing impairment the DoJ letter is clear that the content is not accessible to people with hearing impairment, or visual impairment, or manual disability.

> Could this all potentially just boil down to a couple of professors who didn't have the budget to transcribe what they wanted from free videos thinking if they shook down UC Berkeley with the DOJ they would get it done by UC Berkeley for them, but the scheme went very awry?

Interesting that you use the term "shook down", when it's Berkeley that was not complying with either the law or its own policies.

The problem here was all the people signing Berkeley documents saying they had complied with Berkeley polices and the law when they were ignoring the law.

Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#145

Post by bmelton »

BeetleB wrote: post #107
pnathan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point isn't "if people with disabilities can't have it, no one can." That's just an unfortunate cost of enforcement. That adds substantial costs, and the end result, without additional funding, is no one gets it. Thanks for nothing.

>That adds substantial costs, and the end result, without additional funding, is no one gets it. What do you mean "without additional funding"? All federal grants to universities are by definition "additional funding". And they only have to comply because they are getting this "additional funding". The university is deciding not to allocate this "additional funding" for this purpose, which is being construed as a vio…

There are a couple of things that are interesting to me about this.

1) If you don't have any vision-impaired people in your course, would you continue to 'downgrade' the curriculum to a vision-impaired level?

2) The funding that they get applies to curriculum, but I do sort of wonder whether this isn't an addition to that.

To point 1: The nuance here is that if I have to describe drawings that I present, even where the audience is fully sighted, it seems like it brings down the quality of education for those in the room. Of course non-sighted persons should be accommodated when they are present, though that adds the additional wrinkle of students perhaps trying to game the system so that they're not in an accommodating classroom, as they'd have more time for lecture, questions, etc.

If we accept that you can hold a class appropriate to sighted persons, but not acceptable to sighted persons when there are only sighted persons in attendance, then what is the meaningful distinction between publishing a recording of that class on your website versus just publishing it on YouTube as "Professor X talks about such and such @UCB"? The latter seems like it would be clearly allowed, while the former seems like it is clearly forbidden, which just reminds us that rules are complicated.

To point 2: This seems akin to saying that "Everything on the menu has to have nutritional information". Okay, everything on the menu does have nutritional information, but in addition to the menu items, I'm also offering you this amuse-bouche free of charge. It's not on the menu, and because we change it daily from ingredients that were delivered to us accidentally, we do not have the ability to generate nutritional information. Can I serve the amuse without nutritional info? It is not part of the menu, for which I receive funds, and it is extra, so the rules should suggest that I am allowed to offer it, but you're either living up to the spirit of or violating the spirit of the rule depending on how charitably you interpret the requirements.

Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#146

Post by justin66 »

BeetleB wrote: post #107
pnathan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point isn't "if people with disabilities can't have it, no one can." That's just an unfortunate cost of enforcement. That adds substantial costs, and the end result, without additional funding, is no one gets it. Thanks for nothing.

>That adds substantial costs, and the end result, without additional funding, is no one gets it. What do you mean "without additional funding"? All federal grants to universities are by definition "additional funding". And they only have to comply because they are getting this "additional funding". The university is deciding not to allocate this "additional funding" for this purpose, which is being construed as a vio…

> The university is deciding not to allocate this "additional funding" for this purpose

These grants were not made for the purpose of subtitling videos.

Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#147

Post by BeetleB »

justin66 wrote: post #146
BeetleB wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That adds substantial costs, and the end result, without additional funding, is no one gets it. What do you mean "without additional funding"? All federal grants to universities are by definition "additional funding". And they only have to comply because they are getting this "additional funding". The university is deciding not to allocate this "additional funding" for this purpose, which is being construed as a vio…

> The university is deciding not to allocate this "additional funding" for this purpose These grants were not made for the purpose of subtitling videos.

>These grants were not made for the purpose of subtitling videos.

When my advisor gets a half a million dollars to do research on quantum computers, do you think he gets to use half a million dollars for it?

If you do, you clearly have not been exposed to how grants are processed at universities.

The university takes a cut - I've often heard numbers in the ballpark of 50% - to fund infrastructure. See:

https://www.quora.com/What-percentages-of-research-grant-mon...

This is not a scheme - this is how universities have always dealt with grants.

It's entirely up to the university to decide where to spend this money.

So from the Federal government's perspective, they are funding them for it, and instead the university is choosing not to spend money on this.

Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#149

Post by BeetleB »

bmelton wrote: post #145
BeetleB wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That adds substantial costs, and the end result, without additional funding, is no one gets it. What do you mean "without additional funding"? All federal grants to universities are by definition "additional funding". And they only have to comply because they are getting this "additional funding". The university is deciding not to allocate this "additional funding" for this purpose, which is being construed as a vio…

There are a couple of things that are interesting to me about this. 1) If you don't have any vision-impaired people in your course, would you continue to 'downgrade' the curriculum to a vision-impaired level? 2) The funding that they get applies to curriculum, but I do sort of wonder whether this isn't an addition to that. To point 1: The nuance here is that if I have to describe drawings that I present, even where t…

>This seems akin to saying that "Everything on the menu has to have nutritional information".

We're playing a semantics game. I can easily change it to:

"Every thing you serve has to have nutritional information" and remove all ambiguity.

Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?

#150

Post by bmelton »

BeetleB wrote: post #149
bmelton wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of things that are interesting to me about this. 1) If you don't have any vision-impaired people in your course, would you continue to 'downgrade' the curriculum to a vision-impaired level? 2) The funding that they get applies to curriculum, but I do sort of wonder whether this isn't an addition to that. To point 1: The nuance here is that if I have to describe drawings that I present, even where t…

>This seems akin to saying that "Everything on the menu has to have nutritional information". We're playing a semantics game. I can easily change it to: "Every thing you serve has to have nutritional information" and remove all ambiguity.

Sure, and then I could (probably a better analogy here really) just put it on a table and say "Take One", bypassing the definition of 'serving', depending on how it's been defined.

Whether we like it or not, law is largely just semantic arguments. The point (and reviewing my previous comment) is that it was something extra, for which your previous "funds have already been allocated to curriculum" comment does not apply -- I've taken the federal grants, applied them to curriculum, and then graciously tried to do something extra, but because the extra bit doesn't meet the requirements attached to the funds, I can't.

I'm not opining on whether that's wrong or right, but it is indeed curious. If we view the rules narrowly, as lawyers are taught to do, then the extra bit wouldn't be applicable. If we view them broadly, then logos and mascots might not be allowed unless accompanied by audio and braille descriptions wherever they are used.

My curiosity here derives from wondering where, since the law is being interpreted more broadly than it must be, the line is, and how this might impact future decisions by universities (or other entities that receive strings-attached funding).

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