Bit of a side tangent, but why does MIT upload (or allow the upload) of these videos under the staff member's youtube. Alexander Amini in this case.
It makes it hard to find and subscribe to. And also a bit weird from an ownership perspective.
For better or worse I think it's how Lex Fridman got his initial boost, I believe his personal youtube channel contained some popular MIT lectures of him at the start.
When I worked in higher ed, I learned that professors retain a lot more ownership of their content than I expected. I don’t know if this is how it works everywhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case here.
In basically all cases course material is developed by professors and TAs, though the current lecturer might have adapted from several years of previous work. Who owns the IP exactly is tricky (likely the university has at least an equal stake?), but I expect that if lectures are recorded, but not open-access then it's the lecturer's decision. It might be copyright issues, re-use of someone else's slides, not wanting to let students see past years' work, etc.
For example, I work at ETH and we have a large internal video archive of lectures (as do many universities pre- and post-covid), but some lecturers choose to post material on YouTube too. It's not a blanket yes/no policy at the institutional level, as far as I'm aware.
I thought MIT had to remove a huge catalogue of institutional content (under the opencourseware label) because of an ADA lawsuit. The problem was they didn’t hire people to subtitle it, which was discrimination.
It makes it hard to find and subscribe to. And also a bit weird from an ownership perspective.
For better or worse I think it's how Lex Fridman got his initial boost, I believe his personal youtube channel contained some popular MIT lectures of him at the start.