Problem: Who wants to spend a lot of time learning to teach when you don't really see this as more than a requirement to get that job? Which I completely understand, I don't blame the professors. Having tried a little bit of teaching myself, it's just very, very time-consuming to prepare yourself for doing it really well.

At university in the 1990s I preferred learning from (good) textbooks over most lectures, and today there's the Internet - I've actually gone back to learning with >50 courses on Coursera and edX over the last few years. So I think the problem has shrunk significantly since you can choose to learn from great teachers more easily than ever. But I'm a "pull" person when it comes to learning, meaning I don't even want someone to tell me what I'm supposed to know, I prefer to go out and look and select and get it myself.

It sounds like we're of a similar generation, but my experience was that unfortunately finding good textbooks for mathematics was also very hard. The average textbook was a dry, boring regurgitation of the standard definitions and results in a field and some associated proofs, with no added insight or motivation or context or example applications whatsoever. Many of them were written by the same academics whose lecturers were similarly bland and uninspiring.

Most of those academics could have done with learning about the ADEPT method we're discussing here and similar ideas. Unfortunately, they just had no interest in doing so. As you say, teaching well takes time, but it also takes a willingness to try to teach well.

I remember a particular meeting at the end of an academic year where the teaching representatives of the faculty at my university were seeking feedback from the undergraduate students. When one of the students boldly (but entirely fairly) asked why the presentation skills of most of the lecturers were so bad and why they weren't required to undertake training to improve when the university's teaching so fundamentally depended on them, the reply was essentially "We know and we agree, but they wouldn't accept it." In almost any other profession, the response to substandard performance of a key job function and refusing to undertake measures to improve would be getting fired.

These days, with students here in the UK paying thousands of pounds in fees every year on top of what we used to have, I can't imagine that official response would go down any better than it did for us, but as you say, these days there are more promising alternatives. This is why I think universities need to stop being the main tertiary academic education, at least in anything like their current form.

My problem is that I hate learning from video lectures. Do you know any MooC sites that don't require videos i.e. that present the material in written form (either chiefly or to duplicate lectures)?

Fair point. Perhaps "an interest in teaching" would have been a better way to put it.