Legacy Berkeley course material pulled over accessibility

One of the earliest sources of free education materials I stumbled upon was webcast.berkeley (right up there with MIT OCW).  Seeing these institutions of higher learning release their lectures and course content free, to the masses, made me envision a time when the entire education system could be transformed.  Today, with Coursera, Udacity, and edX, we are well on the way to that revolution.  But despite these (arguably more sophisticated) offering, I always found myself returning to that well.  No more...


March 15, 2017 marked a sad milestone for me, as well as for all independent learners.  UC Berkeley is pulling all of their free educational content from iTunes and YouTube.  In a classic case of "unintended consequences", an accessibility complaint led to an investigation by the US Department of Justice.  The DOJ wrote Berkeley a strongly worded letter basically saying "make the content accessible or there will be hell to pay". So Berkeley did the sensible thing... it pulled all the content.


I admit I have mixed feelings about Berkeley's decision.  On the one hand, I know all too well the constraints that come with budget shortfalls.  From what I gather, California has been cutting spending on education, and dropping a few million dollars to maybe make 20,000 free videos handicapped accessible doesn't make fiscal sense.  On the other hand... really?  You can find half a billion dollars to renovate the football stadium, but you can't scrape together the resources to keep the lights on for your open educational offerings?


I actually learned of Berkeley's decision on the slack channel for a similar course I'm taking through edX.  There was discussion surrounding the merits of 61B, when someone mentioned that the content was getting pulled the next day.  Fortunately, it seems there is a concerted effort to archive and preserve the material, according to a thread on Hacker News.  A group of reddit users with big hard drives and fast internet connections managed to download everything, though it remains to be seen how it will be made publicly available (probably a torrent at the least).


I can't help but be paranoid about the continued availability of other offerings.  While MIT, among others, has said it would not consider deleting content because of the Berkeley decision, I can't help but wonder.  MIT and Harvard are currently facing lawsuits over accessibility.  If faced with incurring the financial and administrative overheads that would be required to come in to and remain in compliance, not to mention any punitive damages if they lose in court... would they come to the same conclusion as Berkeley?  That it just isn't worth it to put these materials out there for free?


I have to think that the forces that put this chain of events in motion never intended for all the material to go away.  The fight for access for the disabled is a noble one.  But in this case I think everyone paid a very dear price indeed.

[UPDATE]
Seems the team at LBRY downloaded all the content and will make it available in April. Score one for the good guys!  Assuming they launch their product and it works as advertised.  Some kind of block chain biz I don't pretend to understand.