> If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
MIT OpenCourseWare still upload a lot of their lectures to YouTube for free (been doing it for decades) and pretty sure some other universities do the same.
The main problem with online courses is lack of "direction" and engagement (which both Udemy and Coursera don't solve)
Stanford's Youtube channel is also a goldmine. There's actually a lot of professors that put their lectures on Youtube, you just have to look (or watch enough that the algorithm finds them for you).
I find the Stanford channel a bit hard to navigate, MIT has a dedicated channel for the courses and another one for the other stuff, I wish Stanford did the same. The same applies to Harvard too