Class Recordings

Back in the day.

Back in winter 2022, yours truly included the following statement in a course syllabus:

California Education Code Section 78907

The use by any person, including a student, of any electronic listening or recording device in any classroom without the prior consent of the instructor is prohibited, except as necessary to provide reasonable auxiliary aids and academic adjustments to disabled students. Any person, other than a student, who willfully violates this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. Any student violating this section shall be subject to appropriate disciplinary action. This section shall not be construed as affecting the powers, rights, and liabilities arising from the use of electronic listening or recording devices as provided for by any other provision of law.

Source: http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/education-code/edc-sect-78907.html

This provision is reprinted because our guest speakers volunteer to participate in the class. They do not consent to have their remarks recorded or circulated on social media. So please do not record them. You ARE free to record presentations by the instructor. [The instructor] may record his own presentations to the class and may make the recordings available.

If the class is in-person and a student is in quarantine, special arrangements will be made.

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Readers may recall that in winter 2022, part of the quarter was online due to a COVID uptick and part was in-person. So, despite the statement, the prohibition on recording guest speakers was totally unenforceable during the remote part of the class and largely unenforceable during the in-person part. Given the fact that cellphones can record and audio recorders are nowadays very small, unlike the machine shown in the image, I might not know recording was occurring even in an in-person setting.*

Still, I hoped that making the request - which was also made orally during the first class of the quarter - would prevent recording.

The statement above includes a proviso exempting recording by disabled students. Such a student, say one with a hearing problem, would not be violating the education code by recording. And, more generally, instructors are supposed to accommodate students with disabilities. But what would happen if a UCLA instructor were to take the position that audio recording (or some voice-to-writing software program that would make a word-for-word transcript) was forbidden and that even disabled students could not use such a device or program? Inside Higher Ed has that story:

Students in Susanne Lohmann’s small seminar classes at the University of California, Los Angeles, debate inflammatory topics, including transgender rights, the Israel-Palestine conflict and the fracas on college campuses over that conflict. This past spring she taught two classes called Radical Disagreement and Global Catastrophic Risk: The Clash of Science, Politics and Ethics, both of which partly focused on Israel and Palestine.

Nowadays.

At a conference last month hosted by Heterodox Academy, an organization that promotes viewpoint diversity in higher education, Lohmann gave an example of the kinds of controversial debates her classes include. “There are solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict—one state, two state—but it turns out the people on the ground actually prefer the two ethnic cleansing solutions,” Lohmann said in her presentation, pointing to public opinion polls, arguments that Israel is an illegitimate state and the Israeli settler movement. One side contends that the region should be free of Jews, and the other side says it should be free of Palestinians, Lohmann said, “and so these two solutions need to be articulated and argued in my class.”

Lohmann, a political science and public policy professor, said she wants to keep what students say in her classes from getting out into the wider world—“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” as she puts it. She said that for years she had complained to her university about students recording audio of her classes, even those who had a disability accommodation allowing it. She told Inside Higher Ed that her students need to be able to take even extremist positions on morally charged or politically controversial issues without fearing their speech “will come to haunt them” outside the classroom.

Audio-recording accommodations have grown more common, and by 2020 it was usual to have three students with audio-recording accommodations in a class of 20, Lohmann said. Subsequently she learned about the transcription software called Otter, which uses artificial intelligence to transcribe audio into written notes.

Lohmann said she became concerned about the possible privacy and commercial exploitation threats that Otter—which, for example, uses human speech to train its AI—posed for students who didn’t consent to being recorded. Others in higher education have also expressed concerns about AI recording. (An Otter spokesperson, in an emailed statement, said, “We believe transparency is important to all meeting participants, and as such, users should always ask for consent and indicate when they are recording and transcribing conversations with others.”)

As she was writing her syllabus for the winter 2022 quarter and preparing to write to the university’s Center for Accessible Education (CAE) to complain yet again, she said a solution occurred to her in an “epiphany.” She wrote into her syllabus that she would fail students who recorded other students, even if they had a disability accommodation.

“The associated grading scheme applies to CAE-registered students as well,” Lohmann wrote. Students were free to record her, she said, unless they used Otter. The students had the legal right to have an audio-recording accommodation, she determined, but she had the academic freedom to fail them for using it. The CAE “pretty much went ballistic,” Lohmann said, but the university eventually gave in.

She said that when her ban first went into effect, she pointed it out to a UCLA disability specialist who had approved a student’s audio-recording accommodation. The specialist replaced the accommodation with a peer note taker, another student who took notes in the class for the student with the accommodation.

Now, she says, UCLA allows her to write into her syllabi that the director of the university’s Center for Accessible Education “has determined that audio recording is unreasonable and inappropriate for the course.” This is accompanied by a statement saying, “CAE students are asked to work with their disability specialist to determine notetaking supports that do not involve audio recording.” Lohmann said she’s yet to give out an F under her ban, as she’s yet to catch a student recording...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/07/10/fs-recording-class-even-students-disabilities.

Note that if someone did violate the no-record/no-transcript policy and put the result on social media, actual detection of who it was might be very difficult. If the course has been successful in allowing student debate, surely it is because students think the risk is low that someone would record and post, not because they think the risk is zero.

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*Yours truly owns an earlier version of the machine shown in the picture, bought in 1960, which still works (somewhat), vacuum tubes and all.