Barring a good reason, and certainly without previous discussions, I would never ever agree to have a talk or lecture or class recorded.
It is now mostly covered (at least at places I’m familiar with). The professor owns the copyright with exceptions. If the recording captures students asking questions those may not be covered or may belong to the university.
Traditionally there were no recordings. Then some students would have conflicts and ask it they could have a friend bring a tape recorder (or just do it). When the video technology became available, they’d ask for a video recording which could usually only be easily done with university equipment. If it was just one off and the recordings were not kept, no one (at least no one I talked to) tough much of it.
Things got a lot more complicated during COVID when everything was routinely Zoomed and often could be recorded by any participant.
In some sense it’s still being worked out.
If you’re teaching online, for example, you might be required to record and post on the university’s platform (and it might be both a policy and ADA violation if you don’t). We were already required to make all of the in-person class materials, including instructor’s notes or slides, available on the platform even before COVID.
I teach at a University on Long Island, close to New York City, so we have faculty who live in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and some even further away. It would be essentially impossible for us to restrict faculty to live in NY, given our location. But we also have adjunct faculty who teach remotely from a distance—the furthest I’m aware of is one retired full-time faculty member, now an adjunct, who retired to Mexico. We tightly limit how many undergrad courses we offer online (now that we’re past COVID), but this instructor is that good that we allow him to teach remotely.
I don’t think the usage is relevant. If somebody owns the copyright, they’re free to use it as they wish unless there were specific exemptions in the original agreement.
Yes - but what I’m trying to say is that 30 years ago, when recordings were made by individual students , the question of who owned the rights was not as important an issue. You wouldn’t have had people refusing to be recorded because they were afraid it would lead to the loss of jobs and so on. Sure, the law is the same either way - but what people will accept is not necessarily the same. There was a time when actors did not receive residuals - the law didn’t change, contracts did.
This was exactly it. When I first started an occasional student would ask to record and no one really thought much about it. When online teaching started to be possible, suddenly the money making aspect of it was relevant. But under existing policies no one really knew what the rights were.
It was a bit like DVDs of TV shows where the owners of the shows hadn’t thought to secure music rights for them only for the broadcast and syndication rights were obtained.
Back in the Goode Olde Days, when I was in first year university, the college had “Chem 120” which was mandatory for anyone continuing on in science-related majors. This, there were 6 professors teching 6 different classes. The one I was assigned to, I swear the prof was 75 years old and falling asleep against the blackboard, droning in a monotone.
There was another prof who was young and eager and a really good teacher. It was the same textbook, tests, etc. so a large number of students from other profs’ lecture times would instead go to his class. The overflow students were sitting on the stairs, in a hall that held over 300 students. (Mine section was lucky if 30 students attended). Eventually they had to restrict entry so you could only go to the classroom you were assigned.
Then someone mentioned his lectures were recorded, and people would go to the Chem library and watch them all the time - back in the pre-VHS days on those giant Sony U-Matic cassettes, in B&W.
I suppose the issue of recorded lectures gets even more complex. After all, the material is organized written by the prof (we hope); but it is “for hire” as the prof works for the unversity. If it closely follows a book, then copyright of the book comes into play also. Already, precendent was the prof and/or journal got copyright on articles about things developed in university settings. I could see where the university would not want to touch these issues with a 10-foot pole. You can find plenty of lectures posted on YouTube today, some I presume by the prof, others as part of the university’s remote courses.
The other issue was, lectures - at least starting years science lectures - would change to accomodate new textbooks. So perhaps the view was that this year’s lecture was not a treasure for the ages. (OTOH, I still have my copy of Feynman Lectures, 3 volumes, for a course from back when it was less that $10 per book. I assume Feynman kept the copyright there).
But then, a lack of forward thinking is nothing new. I had a friend who worked for a firm where the engineers were required to sign something giving the company patent rights to anything they came up with. In true arrogant fashion, the technicians were not included. Nor were the IT department, despite this being the start of the microcomputer revolution where software ideas were probably worth more than engineering ones.
One of those very good reasons is disability accommodation. I’m frequently told that it is a requirement that students have access to a recording of my lectures to accommodate the disability, and I am precluded from knowing what the disability is for privacy reasons.
Absolutely. But are you precluded from retaining any sort of rights or control over the use of your own lectures?
When I was teaching, academic staff retained copyright, but other staff didn’t. This was all about textbooks.
Textbooks are one of the dirty secrets of academia. Choice of textbook involved, by academic standards, big money. If you wrote a successful textbook the income could be very significant. The expectation that every student bought a copy meant that across even just a few universities each year could bring in a very welcome royalty cheque. Of course to prevent a flourishing market in second hand textbooks new editions with gratuitous changes were constantly produced. The easy trick being to revise the exercises in the book. Salesdroids from publishers would be constant visitors.
Writing a textbook and mandating it for your own courses swiftly leads to all manner of conflicts of interest and ethical questions. But there it is. The new world of online content doesn’t make this go away. It potentially exacerbates things. If your textbook is the basis for a course that goes online you probably look to gain yet more book sales. So it isn’t in your interest to pursue action against such courses.
This does tend to broaden the gap between the established academics and the lowly paid contract teachers.
High profile academics doing all the usual modern media appearances and lectures isn’t pure altruistic effort. If they have published a textbook you can be sure they are expecting a dividend.
Eh, at least with online content systems, you’re actually getting something for that price you’re paying. Some of them are good enough to be worth it.
And while professors ripping off their students by requiring them to buy their own textbook is certainly a thing, there are also professors looking out for the interests of their students, too. I had one professor in grad school who said that we could use any edition of the textbook, and then went through on his own and found the problem numbers he wanted in each edition. A professor in undergrad did require his own textbook for the course… but that was because it was a hodgepodge of a course that no other single textbook encompassed, and his book was “published” with a copier and a binding machine and sold for cost. And a different professor in undergrad told the class “There are two good textbooks for this subject. One of the two costs $25, so that’s the one we’re going with”.
If the university uses the pre-installed classroom equipment to record my lecture for a disabled student, I certainly lose control in practical terms. I have no access to that recording, and I do not know whether it is stored or deleted. A frequent accommodation is to give students access to my powerpoints and lecture notes before I give the lectures, which I always balk at. On the one hand, accommodating disability is important to me, and I’m not in a position to second-guess the reasons for any accommodation. On the other, though, no one has ever been able to guarantee that that material won’t be posted online or otherwise used for something beyond the class. I’d be fine with having the student access that material on screens the university controls, no downloads allowed, but I’m NOT sanguine about having students download things like that (when I think they should have access to something, I make a .pdf handout that they CAN download).
I’m always reluctant to give out my lecture notes before class for the simple reason that they’re incomplete. I’ve got some things up on the slide already, but there are other very relevant things that are going to be added to it via marker while I’m presenting it. A student using the pre-lecture version is going to be missing out.
Well, exactly. I’m in the Humanities, so my powerpoint slides are useless without the lecture, and the notes are positively incoherent. I think whoever designed this accommodation is thinking of math classes.
Nope, I’m a math teacher. A lot of my pre-lecture slides consist of just the statement of a problem, and then I show the class how to work through it.
Hmm… my assumption my be due to my last math class having been in the 1980s.
One basic undergraduate course I took, there was no assigned textbook. I could find copied/bound lecture notes typed by somebody who taught that same class 30 years previously, and of course the library was full of books and miscellaneous resources (and photocopiers, and yes there was a note reminding people to keep copying to fair use).
I have witnessed this very thing fail in the real world, but it could be handled at the departmental level by picking a book [or writing a book or lecture notes, online materials] to be used for all the courses in question and, among other thing, ensuring 1) it is good and up-to-date 2) nobody or corporation makes a profit or has a conflict of interest 3) it is available to students free or at cost.
I have noticed that all of the MIT OpenCourseware (including slides, lecture notes and some videorecorded lectures) is available under a noncommercial, share-alike Creative Commons license.
Our department has done this for a course I teach, but it’s less than ideal. I’m required to use it, and prevented from ordering other books.
You’re a member of the department, and could at least theoretically ask to change the standard textbook to a different one (though I do know firsthand how much institutional inertia can go into questions like that-- “We use this textbook because it’s the one that lines up with how we teach the course, and we teach the course that way because it lines up with the textbook we use. And by ‘lines up’, we’re ignoring the fact that we always do chapters 6 and 7 before chapter 3 and then skip chapter 5.”).