Why I Won’t Let My Classes Be Recorded
Why I Won’t Let My Classes Be Recorded
Why I Won’t Let My Classes Be Recorded
By John Villasenor
January 10, 2020
Summary
For a student forced to miss class for a legitimate reason, such as illness, having access to a video can make it easier and more efficient to catch up.
Highly interactive classes - my forthcoming law-school class will have about 25 students and is designed to provide plenty of student engagement - there are also reasons that the growing practice of recording classes should give us pause.
One is privacy: Not mine, which I've long since decided doesn't exist when I'm standing at the front of a classroom, but that of the students.
Idea Lab: Student Success Today's students live in a world in which an increasing fraction of their lives is digitally surveilled.
A counterargument might be made that classrooms aren't places where students can expect privacy.
There is certainly no confidentiality obligation placed on students.
If students are too afraid to express their opinions, is real learning taking place? Finally, regardless of what colleges might claim, once these recordings are made, they are likely to last indefinitely.
Imagine if recordings existed of the college or graduate-school classes that today's politicians and business leaders took in their student days.
Classrooms should be places where students can engage in candid, spontaneous discussion on complex topics, even when doing so could involve saying things that might be considered innocuous today but offensive by the social-media mobs of the 2040s.
Highly interactive classes where much of the speaking time goes to the students, the convenience of having an archive of recorded class meetings is more than outweighed by the costs of a diminished learning environment.
Reference
Villasenor, J. (2020, January 10). Why I Won’t Let My Classes Be Recorded. Retreived January 16, 2020 From https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Won-t-Let-My-Classes/247827.