Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coursera to combine with Udemy

investor.coursera.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 395 posts

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#371

Post by BeetleB »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #369
BeetleB wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect. This is a falsehood. The complaint was that some videos had no transcription at all. There were other complaints, BTW - it wasn't just subtitles. There were complaints about blind people not being able to read the docs. Edit : I think one of the (multiple) complaints was poor transcription. What I meant by "falsehood" was actually referring…

Just doing a little research - I haven’t looked too deeply into- Google live caption has been built into Chrome since 2021 and there have been third party tools for accessibility since 2016. But the overall question, is the world a better place now that the information isn’t available to anyone?

> But the overall question, is the world a better place now that the information isn’t available to anyone?

Sorry, but the question is: Is the world a better place if organizations feel they need not comply with this law?

If the answer is yes, then go fix the law. Stop picking on the little guys.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#372

Post by BeetleB »

superxpro12 wrote: post #365
BeetleB wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How accessible is the course now? Entirely irrelevant. If a city has a public library, but refuses to build a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator to upper floors, and doesn't provide reasonable alternatives to these deficiencies, they can (and should) get sued. If the city then throws up their hand and says "Too expensive" and shuts down the library (everyone suffers), I will not be siding with the library.

You are being intentionally obtuse and completely ignoring any practical reality. By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word. This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.

> By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word.

I'll reiterate my comment earlier: Most people in this thread don't seem to have any idea how any of this works.

No - if someone cannot see, the law doesn't say eliminate visual material. It's more like "Provide alternative means for them to understand the same concepts (while keeping the same material)."

There are standards on what accommodations to provide for which disabilities. This isn't something everyone has to figure out on their own. If the standards dictate something for people who are both blind and deaf, it's because it is not technically onerous to provide for them.

I don't know if the standards do for this case, though.

> This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.

What I find to be bad faith is people skirting around the issue that the problem (if any), is not those who complained, but the law. This isn't an isolated case. Both Harvard and MIT were also sued. And just like Berkeley, both ultimately settled. If 3 of the top universities can't fight this, it means that if you want change, lobby to change the law. Start looking into how these universities are pushing to change the law. If they aren't, you'll get a good sense of why these laws exist.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#373

Post by BeetleB »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #370
BeetleB wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit : Just realized the library discussion was in another thread - but the discussion was still with you so I'm keeping it in this comment. > So how did that work out for the hypothetical “disabled person”? He didn't have access before, and he doesn't have access now. Nothing is worse for him. It's not his responsibility to provide the service to others. It is the library's, and they clearly failed and are rightfull…

Did the federal funds cover making it accessible? Was the person suing a student or prospective student of UC Berkeley who couldn’t get in because of accessibility? If the student had been blind and deaf should they hace flown someone out to personally communicate with them like was done with Helen Keller?

> Did the federal funds cover making it accessible?

All federal funds that go to universities have strings attached. One of them is the requirement that all services to the public must be accessible. Not "try to be" or "make a good effort". It's up to the university to budget appropriately.

As a faculty member, a big percentage of any research grant I get goes straight to the department - I cannot use it for my research. It's up to the department to use the money appropriately, and if they're not budgeting for accessibility, it's on them.

> Was the person suing a student or prospective student of UC Berkeley who couldn’t get in because of accessibility?

For someone arguing so passionately, perhaps you should actually go learn something about the case?

> If the student had been blind and deaf should they hace flown someone out to personally communicate with them like was done with Helen Keller?

Great question. What does the law require for such a person?

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#374

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

BeetleB wrote: post #371
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just doing a little research - I haven’t looked too deeply into- Google live caption has been built into Chrome since 2021 and there have been third party tools for accessibility since 2016. But the overall question, is the world a better place now that the information isn’t available to anyone?

> But the overall question, is the world a better place now that the information isn’t available to anyone? Sorry, but the question is: Is the world a better place if organizations feel they need not comply with this law? If the answer is yes, then go fix the law. Stop picking on the little guys.

The organization did comply with the law - they gave everyone the same access - none

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#375

Post by wat10000 »

contagiousflow wrote: post #359
wat10000 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just sit there in class and then never do anything with what you learned afterwards? That certainly isn't how I approached university.

Doing something with the knowledge given in a lecture is very distinct from fact checking it

I'd say it's a subset of fact checking it. You can check facts without doing anything else, but doing something with the knowledge is inherently checking it. If the lecture presents some programming technique, and I implement it, I'll find out pretty quickly if it's wrong.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#376

Post by jghn »

locknitpicker wrote: post #301
nickjj wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead. The same thing with blogs in general. A post could be popular and ranked highly in 2020 but in 2025 it's not even ranked on a search engine, even if the content is still highly relevant and fully working. It's bad because you could have a 10+ year old site with 500+ p…

> Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead. There is a difference between being dead and not actively maintained. If a popular FLOSS package isn't touched for many moons, do you think it just means it's done?

There's nuance here. Is it not being maintained because it does what it is supposed to do and there aren't any issues with it? Or is there a growing pile of issues being opened with no activity around them?

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#377

Post by nsagent »

torben-friis wrote: post #27

As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching. Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted. Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time…

Agreed. That's how I got my start in ML, through Andrew Ng's course a little over a decade ago. I then went on to get my PhD in CS focused on NLP.

Re: Coursera to combine with Udemy

#379

Post by drnick1 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #302
drnick1 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly that depends on the nature of the software. For instance, I don't expect some header-only library that does what it's supposed to do to ever need updating.

> Certainly that depends on the nature of the software. For instance, I don't expect some header-only library that does what it's supposed to do to ever need updating. If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions. Also, if the project is actively maintained then there is a…

> If it's a headers-only library in a language such as C++, if the project is not dead then the very least anyone would expect from it is being updated to support any of the modern C++ versions.

C++ versions are backward compatible. You don't need to modify code that works just to use recent languages features that you don't need.

Post reply on HN