I am STRONGLY against this kind of service and I hope you will consider removing any recording that was not approved by the lecturer.
Otherwise, I want a recording of everything you have said while working. Actually, I want a recording of everything everybody said while they were working so my BigBrother TM audio processing technology can highlight anything that was out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever.
I hope you understand that most lecturers/profs/researchers/people aren't concerned about their copyrights. They are concerned about their reputation and about what ill intentioned school administrators, students or politicians could do with these recordings. You just need one bad case of misuse of these recordings before some universities or unions sue the hell out of you.
I share your goal: education is good and the more people learn, the better the world will become. But if you start recording everything I say in my lectures, I promise you that they will be way more boring.
Are there any known instances of a lecture recording being used against an instructor unfairly?
I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way. In any case, there are better ways to be interesting and entertaining [1].
I think everyone understand that instructors aren't concerned about copyrights. They're concerned about having to improve the quality of their lectures, or have a permanent record of lectures they're not really proud of.
"I think everyone understand that instructors aren't concerned about copyrights."
Well if you click on the "about" link on lectureleaks.com, you'll see that they only talk about copyrights. They do not seem to care about anything else... Incidentally, they have quite a lengthy copyright and license notice themselves... Maybe I should write one for my course.
"Are there any known instances of a lecture recording being used against an instructor unfairly?"
If you asked me whether instructors were sometimes treated unfairly by students, administrators or politicians, I would say yes. Having access to recorded lectures just adds a new angle of attack.
"I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way."
I was actually referring to some ill intentioned people who would turn a joke, a simple mistake you made, or a controversial topic you taught against you. For example, teaching evolution is a risky business in some US states.
But people don't want anonymized recordings, they want to know that they are listening to a recording of a psychology lecture at Harvard, not a generic psychology lecture. If you anonymizing a Harvard lecture, someone else will go "There's no harvard lecture on this site, I'll record my own one and upload it"
Hmm, I like that idea, but only if it's limited to the big lecture-style courses. Having taught some smaller classes, I'd be sort of annoyed if one of my lectures showed up online, without me having really prepared for it to be polished or well-thought-out enough to be permanently archived for worldwide broadcast. Talking to a group of 20-30 people somewhat informally would be hard to do if I knew that it were being recorded. Students might be more reticent with questions/discussion as well, if they knew that those would also be showing up on the internet.
With, say, conference keynotes it's different because those are consciously supposed to be public performances, and arguably the big Physics 101 lectures in a 300-person auditorium are pretty similar as well, especially if they're by a prof who's given the lecture several times, so has a sort of "standard" rehearsed performance of it.
Agreed. I teach lower down in the academic chain. Dyslexic students often ask if they can record (audio) lessons. We teach in small groups and I encourage people to ask questions, and take over the whiteboard &c.
The deal with students recording the session is that the recordings are for personal use only. Noone has broken that understanding as yet so far as I am aware...
Because everyone in a participatory/discussion class would have to agree to have the distribution happen. Plus, you may not want certain discussions to go public, depending on the nature of the subject and the direction some discussions take.
EDIT: s/wild/public/ I was originally looking for 'viral', but I just remember some of my smaller college classes sometimes getting into intimate discussions that wouldn't have happened if there was a chance that the class would have been public.
This is something we've heard a lot of from professors - not sure how it will play out in the long run (we only launched a week ago, although we already have submissions from ~60 schools - more audio than we can process!!)
Perhaps the solution is to cut them off at the pass, as it were. Record your lectures yourself and make them available online, so students won't even be thinking about making bootlegs.
> Record your lectures yourself and make them available online
The point though is then it's not the same teaching--- if I'm recording something For Official Broadcast, it's a different kind of thing than if I'm having an informal seminar with 20 people in a room where we all (at least sort of) know each other. I'll be more formal and less chatty, students will be less free with their discussion too, etc.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a more formal, archival-intended lecture from the podium, like a keynote speech or a big auditorium lecture. But I don't think it should be the only kind of thing to exist, either. I think it should be possible for people to discuss and learn in smaller groups without anyone (teachers or students) worrying that every single thing they say is on-camera, 1984-style. I mean, apart from me; do my students want every single question they ask in class, some smarter-sounding than others, to end up on the internet?
I do support making the materials more widely (and ideally, freely) available--- course notes, slides, papers, tutorials, textbooks, etc. It's just actually recording people against their will in a setting where they should be able to feel free to discuss & ask questions that has the weird 1984-ish vibe.
Concerning the questions students ask. I completely concur that it is an issue.
I have only ever taught lab classes, and even in those groups of 10-14 people, getting people comfortable enough to ask their questions took a skill (I don't know if I ever got the hang of it) and constant attention toward not shutting people down. The times that the class was split into lab-partner teams of 2 people, and I roamed between those teams, the questions were far more free-flowing, and about basic/fundamental concepts. Letting me know I probably wasn't covering those kinds of concepts well enough other times, but I wasn't getting feedback on it because no one had wanted to ask.
In my possibly biased and very limited experience, it was usually students with more "in-your-face gruffness" that would speak-up in larger groups to ask about basic things I wasn't explaining as well as they needed. It made me appreciate that personality type more.
Woah, what? I understand how people could believe that papers should be public given that many were funded by public research grants, but I've taught a class for two years now and not only am I not funded through a public research grant, I'm not paid. I don't see how you could construe that my lectures are the property of anyone but me and my university (which is private).
The sense of entitlement that people get when tax dollars are even remotely involved is astonishing. While I agree with the idea of open-access journals, I find this vigilantism crude and a bit naive.
If you think about it, the people also pay the salaries of corporate employees. You buy the product, it's your dollar at work. Yet nobody has the same sense of I paid you thus I deserve all your ip and time that they do when tax dollars are at work. I suppose it must have something to do with having a choice to pay: with taxes, you have none.
I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.
> I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.
I think it might be people with genuine idealism about the virtues of openness trying to find a way to go in that direction and hoping to yoke the sense of entitlement other people have in order that it will do some rhetorical work for them. If you find the one distasteful, then those seeking to use it as a tool might lose some respect for doing so.
Personally I think the important issue for more openness isn't finding such rhetoric to motivate it. It is finding and promoting solutions to the review process and filtering/ranking-by-quality of papers in more fields. If the best minds in a field don't have any other incentive toward contributing to that process than the journal system, then I still need to go through the maw of the journals (or tell the library I use to do so) when I need to learn about the field using the benefit of the understanding in those minds.
