[blagie]

This sort of thing makes me depressed. The videos are LLM slop. You're a confused student. You do a web search. You run into something like this. It looks high-quality and professional. It is dogshit which no one can understand. The result is a confused learner who feels bad about themselves.

At the same time, thousands of low-quality resources overwhelm good content.

Integrating with an existing resources like MOOCulus could add a ton of value, in contrast, but wouldn't have the promise of making the creators money.

Being able to create manim animations at scale is a value-add, but doesn't seem enough of a value-add to create a business which does anything other than active harm. But it seems to be trying to be one.

[nsd65]

Well you can goto any large library in the world and you will find a zillion books on Calculus. Part of the learning and developmental process is working out for yourself what is "good" and "bad". And that has a lot to do with what your background is and what problems you are using Calculus for. So I dont feel its a new issue. People who want something better learn to find it.

[pishpash]

Most textbooks are bad too. It's worth looking at some sample content to find the good ones.

[sinaatalay]

There are some incorrect premises here.

"The videos are LLM slop." - No, they're not. Watch them.

"It's dogshit that no one can understand." - That's not true. Try it.

[aureianimus]

I watched some snippets, and would like to put forward some points in support of the former:

- The voice is clearly TTS, which I think really loses something. Not having variation or stressing particular parts with intonation is a big deal in teaching. The beginning of lecture 5 has a pause in a weird spot (surface).

- The intro to the first lecture is already unnatural: "And that's of course now we're going to start working with functions of more than one variable."

- The scaffolding in lecture 1 is off to a bad start. The lecture tries to rope the student in with a question, but the question uses the notion and notation of a vector that has not been introduced yet. This reeks of a prompt "use a (motivating) question to introduce the topic", but a question that cannot be understood by a student does not help.

[sinaatalay]

These are 14 hours of video, so it's easy to find mistakes. We've probably made plenty of them. But this isn't AI slop.

We created the technology so that the content can be updated and improved over time. If we make mistakes, we'll fix them and continue maintaining the material. These aren't static MP4 files recorded once with a camcorder.

[aureianimus]

To give a more precise indication, I watched maybe the first 5 minutes of lecture 1 and 5 for this.

I highly encourage you to take "didicatically useful" as a bar to aim for, rather than "not making mistakes".

I think it's a cool tech demo, but if you're positioning this as a course that's ready to be consumed by students, I think doing the quality control is not optional.

[sinaatalay]

Thank you for the feedback! We'll make it better. We take quality very seriously.

[blagie]

I did try it.

I'd provide feedback on how to make this better, but to be frank, I don't want to see this made better. I'd like open education made better. I'm on the other side here. Even if I did, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't listen.

In my career, I've done both open and closed models (more of the former in recently, more of the latter early career). I'm open to both, but education should be open, for a whole slew of reasons I can enumerate.