Maybe it should be required that public or publicly funded universities have a set of relatively up-to-date lecture recordings for each course. Since covid, I know for a fact most UW CSE courses were/are being recorded and saved to Canvas CMS for students who miss lecture/have covid/worry about covid/etc. These should be made public!
The hairiest issue here is when there's student participation. But you don't need each quarter to be online, just once every time there are significant course changes. The quarter that will be uploaded could be announced as such and students could consent to being recorded. But this isn't a big deal, MIT has a lot of open courseware with students being recorded. It'd be easy to survey and compare student experiences with/without recordings. But the benefit for the public could be enormous! Think about the public good of every publicly funded university's courseware being accessible online for free.
The majority of the funding in several flagship state universities comes not from the state but from the operations of the university itself: tuition, fees, stores, programs. We the public literally did not pay for all these courses. And the rate on a presentation, speech, or training course, you'll find, is very different when it's delivered to a specific audience versus being put on the Internet for free.
UW receives 37% of its funding from the state, the rest comes from tuition[0]. In 2002, it was 70% from the state. And of tuition, at least ~25% of that comes from public sources (grants, subsides loans)[1].
And even if some public universities are self-sustaining now, that doesn't lessen the fact that public money was the major cause that started that flywheel.
And regardless of funding, UW, like all public universities, has an explicit directive to operate for the "benefit of present and future citizens of the State of Washington"[2][3].
As for course lecture quality, if it's worthwhile to the students, it can be worthwhile for the public.
The hairiest issue here is when there's student participation. But you don't need each quarter to be online, just once every time there are significant course changes. The quarter that will be uploaded could be announced as such and students could consent to being recorded. But this isn't a big deal, MIT has a lot of open courseware with students being recorded. It'd be easy to survey and compare student experiences with/without recordings. But the benefit for the public could be enormous! Think about the public good of every publicly funded university's courseware being accessible online for free.