This LA Law prof ( John Villasenor (UCLA))
“…It’s not that I don’t recognize the advantages of recording. 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. I also recognize that in large lecture-hall courses with hundreds of students, opportunities for substantive student participation are limited. …
And there’s a “but” as the next word – literally. When I taught my class, I made SURE to record each one and the above was for one of those reasons – student absence. While I had an presentation for each class available for students, stuff goes on that’s “offline” from the Powerpoint. Besides, I had told my class that while the text was certainly targetable for quizes and exams, so was anything I said during class.
The second reason was for ME – you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. You can’t improve unless you know what is the “present process”. While lecturing, you’re in the moment – a recording allows for a bit of distance to allow one to figure out “that worked, that didn’t, this sucked, and I have to figure out a better way to get this concept across better and faster”. If you don’t record yourself, you lose faster.
But for smaller, 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. …Another concern is that recording chills classroom discourse. …
Pfft, I had 12 students – and I can tell you that there was NO problem with “chilling classroom discourse”. While I gave them plenty of work to do, that also required that I talk a lot. My style is also Socratic – while I talk a lot, I also ask a lot of questions and I required answers. Given, too, that these young adults had shared a lot of classes again, they knew each other – well. There was no holding back with them in their banter amongst themselves – and about each other. To a point, I encouraged it for one important reason – if they’re laughing, they’re paying attention.
Chilling? Nope – I often had to rope them back in. Sorry, Prof – change your style to ENCOURAGE more participation.
Finally, regardless of what colleges might claim, once these recordings are made, they are likely to last indefinitely. That means they will be available for scrutiny years or decades into the future. Imagine if recordings existed of the college or graduate-school classes that today’s politicians and business leaders took in their student days. It’s a safe bet that there would be a cottage industry of people working to dig those recordings up, scrutinizing them for any comments that could be weaponized, and triumphantly posting the fruits of their searches on social media.
That is a problem not only for future politicians and business leaders, but for all of us as well.
Get over yourself. Unless you are taking all cell phones and putting them in a box until the end of class, somebody is going to record it (and some folks have multiple phones). Most people understand this. They may not like it but that’s the culture. Also, the operative phrase is not “would be a cottage industry” – it has existed for years; please try to keep up. And yes, it’s just another type of Risk that comes along with Life.
Sorry, the pros outweigh the cons. Not everyone reviewed the videos (they weren’t public) all the time but when they were needed, they were there.
So, I disagree with Prof Villasenor. Emphatically.
(H/T: Instapundit)
