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When looking for online lecture notes, I notice that most of the time you have to be a student and login in using your institution information to get access.
Why would a professor not show the lecture notes freely for anyone who is interesting in learning?
Surely 'cuz you're not paying the tuition for the class... To put it bluntly, that's what tuition is for: to give you access to class material and instructor time.
I doubt having coursework material password-protected is uniformly a decision of the instructor: certainly where I work my notes, assignments (including solutions), exams are on a university platform which is accessible only to students.
I ask my students NOT to distribute my notes because they're full of typos, contain images for which I have not sought permission to reproduce, and are just not ready for prime time. I would not want such notes to be publicly available, and I do not foresee making them available until I have thoroughly reviewed them.
In my observation, this change is a recent epiphenomenon that is tied to the widespread organizational deployment of learning management systems (LMS).
Thirty years ago, course notes were not generally online, because even in leading universities the Internet hadn't taken hold sufficiently yet. You got your lecture notes on paper, typically by picking up handouts at the classroom door each lecture or by going to a university office and buying a cheaply bound booklet of such notes at the beginning of the semester.
Twenty years ago, it was easy to set up a course webpage and point students to it, but most universities had ad-hoc systems not designed for online course management. This meant that professors could stop worrying about handouts and start sticking a PDF online on a course webpage. The professor generally put that webpage together themselves, and restricting access to material they posted would take a lot of extra work. These was no real incentive for a professor to put in that effort, and thus a large volume of class notes became freely accessible to the general public as a side effect.
Class notes are only one part of the story, however, and a good LMS also helps a professor with managing and reporting assignments, tests, and grades (which can be a big benefit both to individual professors and to universities overall). In most systems, these materials are considered confidential information and must be protected. Thus, any material posted in an LMS is restricted by default. As a result a professor now needs to explicitly decide that they want to post material openly and take extra steps to do so, including considering all of the concerns that have been raised in other answers.
Bottom line: widespread freely accessible lecture notes were a temporary side effect of the technological transition to online course material.
In practice, the decisive questions for an instructor posting their notes online are:
Are you, as a writer, sufficiently proud of your own notes that you won't be embarrassed to see them circulate widely?
Do you have a personal website or care enough (and have the time) to build one? (Even the easiest options, like Github Pages, take half an hour or so of getting used to. As some commenters have noticed, it's much easier to just push the notes on your institution's learning management system, provided that you're used to that.)
Do you mind if the open availability of your notes will make it harder to publish them commercially as a book afterwards? (This is not a very serious issue in maths nowadays, as most publishers are fine with building on OA material, and some are even fine with the accepted manuscripts of books being OA. But it might be an issue in other disciplines.)
Zero's answer is not representative. All instructors I know have the right to freely distribute their notes; unlike patents, copyrights by regular faculty do not default to their institutions (I even recall this being explicit in American universities). Copyright issues around pictures and long quotes are at least theoretically relevant sometimes, but to my knowledge they aren't a decisive factors, as authors don't seem to care that much (I've seen my share of freely available or even OA lecture notes that, strictly speaking, are giving away what isn't theirs by quoting pages upon pages of textbooks).
Where I've worked, making teaching materials available on the password-protected digital learning environment was compulsory by university policy, but making them available on the public internet was at the option of the individual faculty member. I never did make mine publicly available, because they contained third-party copyrighted material for which internal distribution was protected by the educational "fair dealing" exemption in UK copyright law, but public distribution would not have been.
So in Germany, everyone else here is wrong.
The reason is Copyright.
The lecturers, as educators, enjoy a very broad and free exemption from copyright, and therefore can create their slides/handouts etc. without much thought to ask for permission for this graph or that figure. They simply see something they think would help student understand the topic and paste it in there (with proper citation mostly).
This exemption however, is limited to material that they share as part of an official course/seminar etc., as part of their job as educators. Sharing this - regularly copyright-violating - material outside of this narrow scope would leave them wide open to all the lawsuits and other trouble that come along with copyright. This is also why most of them absolutely don't care or even low-key encourage uploading the files elsewhere: because then it's not THEM who did the copyright violation but the uploading student.
The reason seems obvious to me as a software engineer.
UK-focused perspective: universities are heavily subsidized by the taxpayers. I find it very hard to justify not sharing the notes these notes with the people who payed for it (ie making them generally accessible in the UK). So I think the answer is, that the uproar about this issue (taking taxpayer money and not sharing the thing which was produced using it) is not sufficiently high enough to put enough pressure on universities to share these notes.
I personally share my notes to whoever asks for it. I haven't made a website where I put it there to anyone who isn't even asking for it, but maybe I'll in the future.
A related post: How much money is spent on students' above their tuition fees in the UK?
