Why I Won't Let My Classes Be Recorded

If students are too afraid to express their opinions, is real learning taking place?

In early January, I received an email message from an audio-visual coordinator at the UCLA School of Law asking whether I wanted my spring-semester class to be recorded. More specifically, the message informed me that all class sessions are recorded by default unless the instructor opts out. I responded, as I have to similar messages in previous years, with a request not to record my class.

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. When the experience of sitting in the lecture hall is hardly more interactive than watching the lecture on a laptop screen, there are few downsides and plenty of upsides to recording.

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.

Today's students live in a world in which an increasing fraction of their lives is digitally surveilled. Their locations are tracked by their smartphones, their online activities are logged by app providers, their text messages are stored in their phones and in the phones of others, and their comings and goings are tracked by key cards and by cameras in building entrances and hallways. A highly interactive classroom should be a space beyond the reach of the digital panopticon. It should not be a space where every student utterance is archived on a college-run server, regardless of how supposedly secure that server might be.

A counterargument might be made that classrooms aren’t places where students can expect privacy. After all, there is certainly no confidentiality obligation placed on students. They are free to - and often do - convey to people outside the classroom things that were said by an instructor or by classmates. But privacy isn't binary; it's not as if the only options are complete privacy or none at all. A college classroom exists in an interesting in-between space that is certainly not private in the way that a living room is, but also not nearly as public as a televised debate among political candidates.

That position along the spectrum between private and fully public turns out to be particularly conducive to discourse: Classroom conversations can benefit from a far greater diversity of perspectives than are found in the average living-room conversation, and these conversations occur without the scripted, performative style of dialogue that is often on view in televised debates and other very public settings. Recording risks upsetting that balance, pushing the classroom environment closer to one that lacks any vestiges of privacy.

Another concern is that recording chills classroom discourse. A recorded conversation is one that, rather than occurring only once, might be replayed many times, for any number of reasons. The parties to a recorded conversation can include not only the people in the room but also an unknown number of additional people in the future. Most people speak differently and more cautiously under such circumstances, and rightly so, as things they say can be taken out of context and potentially used against them.

A recorded classroom is one in which the opinions expressed are far more limited in scope. This risks denying students full access to what should be a key feature of higher education: the opportunity to engage in dialogue with fellow students who hold perspectives that, while legitimate and valuable to consider, might not fit neatly with their own views.

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. 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. 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. The upshot is that for large lecture courses, there's a certain logic behind recording classes (provided, of course, that students and the instructor are duly notified that the recording is taking place). But for small, 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.



John Villasenor is a professor of electrical engineering, law, and public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles.
He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.