I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

This is a general issue i have seen as well.

We live in 2018 and there is no open source course for everything. Instead there are probably 10-30k universities who have similar courses and professors who give the same lecture every year.

They get paid often enough by countries to create and do those courses. In germany most of our unversities are paid by all of us germans anyway.

And what do you find online? Always the starter verion like 101 computer science or videos with bad audio or video, no proper exercises, no solution helper etc. Nothing. You have to go to different sites to sometimes pay or sometimes not.

there are no local locations to meet up with people.

There should be a global initiative for global free and open access learning. Sponsored and supported by companies and countries. Build upon a core of a knowledge graph based on topics or 'snippets of knowledge'. Like for example: math -> add -> sub

Something like 'The Map of Mathematics' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y)

And when you wanna get the global accepted math 101 level, you have to take specific topics / snippets.

And those snippets can than be filled with different people who are making a lecture for that topic and you can choose whom you like more or who is better in explaining it to you.

What do i do instead? I ask around for the lecture scripts because they are always behind a simple password protected area or have multiple links to different pages of different universietses who offer different courses for free as videos for there students in sometimes/often bad quality and / or bad video players etc.

It sucks and this is stupid.

Here is a list of CS courses including many graduate level courses:

https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses