Academia – The Renegade Coder

Since joining academia as an educator in 2018, I've continued to change and evolve my approach to teaching. In that same time, the world has changed somewhat dramatically. In contrast, however, there's one thing I'm not changing: I will not be recording my lectures any time soon. Life in Higher Education Being an educator is a really weird profession. On one hand, you have a considerable amount of power. You can quite literally control the destiny of a student simply by doing your job. If you want a certain outcome for your students, such as success and failure, you can make that happen through your selection of assessments, activities, and resources. On the other hand, there are so many different stakeholders that want to control what you do and how you do it. At the university level, there might be accrediting bodies that dictate what, when, and how material should be covered. Likewise, your university, college, or department might have additional requirements, requests, or restrictions. In addition, as is the case where I live, the state government might want to flex its control. In many cases, it's really hard to even know the origins of a policy because there are so many different governing bodies shaping the way you run a classroom. Of course, many of the aforementioned stakeholders are top down. In other words, they dictate policies and expectations that are forced upon educators. In contrast, there are also "grassroots" stakeholders like students, who might have ideas about how a classroom should be run. As a result, they could push back if you try to do anything new or different than the established norms across other courses. These types of complaints tend to show up in student evaluations and in other more public facing places like Reddit or Rate My Professors. If you're a decent educator, you might also lean into another group of stakeholders: education researchers. These are the folks that come up with and validate educational techniques like think-pair-share, jigsaw, flipped classroom, universal design, and peer instruction. They're also the same folks that can inform the way you assess your students and, broadly, build out educational theories. As you can imagine, it's very rare for all these stakeholders to be in alignment, and I would argue that these days they're often very much in opposition. For every evidence-based practice, there is some corporate pressure to bypass it with the latest tech innovation. For every rave review from a student, there is a government policy attempting to disrupt the student experience. Therefore, what might look like a powerful position (i.e., "with great power comes great responsibility") from the outside is actually a delicate balancing act between a series of powerful stakeholders. Reasons for Not Recording Lectures At this point, you might be wondering: what does that all have to do with recorded lecturers? Well, it turns out that recorded lectures have become a popular requested resource by students, departments, and more since the pandemic. The benefit is somewhat obvious: sometimes you just want to be able to watch back over a lecture. So, why don't I record my lectures? That's the topic of today's article. In this section, I'll break down the various reasons why I don't record my lectures. I think it's fine if others choose to do so, but I'm not a fan. Hopefully this article makes it clear why. I Don't Think My Lectures Work Well as Videos Anyone who has attended one of my classes knows that my lecture style is bad for the camera. Specifically, I run a discussion-based classroom for my software courses, and this can be a bit jarring to folks used to traditional lectures. The idea is pretty simple: I present a concept to students as a question, and I have them think about it before discussing their thoughts with their peers. Often, I expect students to have no idea how to answer the questions, but I do want them to think about them. Sometimes these discussions go nowhere and that's okay. Of course, that means that much of the recording would be crowd noise as students discuss their thoughts. Then, when students report out, their responses might not get picked up by the mic. Meanwhile, I'm doing my usual teacher voice at the front of the class that's sure to hurt the ears of anyone listening. In short, my lectures just don't work as recordings. I Don't Want a Recording to Discourage Students From Participating In STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), students are used to the norm of traditional lecturing. They're used to sitting down at a desk and taking notes for an hour without a moment of rest. Naturally, when students come to my class, they have to adjust to the idea that they have to talk. This can take potentially weeks as I try to make students more comfortable by learning their names and discussing pop culture with them. Ultimately, the goal is to create a space where folks are comfortable enough to, in the words of Miss Frizzle, "take chances, make mistakes, and get messy." Nothing can really compare to a space where students are willingly giving their best guesses to problems they've never seen. So, I would be opposed to recording my lectures. Nothing kills serendipity, authenticity, and spontaneity faster than surveillance, even if that surveillance results in a useful educational resource. You will never convince me to make that trade. I Don't Want to Censor Myself In order to create a culture where students feel comfortable being wrong, I need to be authentically me. I need to present myself not as an authority figure but as a guide helping students along their own learning journeys. I need to present myself as someone who also makes mistakes and gets things wrong. If I record my lectures, I have to sanitize my personality for the camera. I can't ever slip up and say something edgy or weird. I can't lean into memes or make jokes. I can't talk about my life outside of work. I have to be a cookie cutter professor. Hopefully, it's obvious why I can't be authentically me on camera, but I'll explain anyway. Sometimes I say stupid stuff or have bad opinions. For instance, after I heard about the new accessibility requirements for digital materials, I ranted to my class. I somewhat immediately regretted this rant because it made me look like I was against accessibility. Thankfully, that ephemeral moment of weakness was never recorded, and most students probably don't even remember it. Of course, I don't need a moment of weakness to be concerned about recordings. Surely, there are ways to deceptively cut videos for nefarious purposes (as I'll describe shortly). Likewise, I don't need people referencing clips as proof that I said or didn't say something, and I certainly don't want folks not in my classes watching me teach. I consider those moments private, just like I would consider texts, emails, meetings, and phone calls private. I Don't Want My Recordings Used for Nefarious Purposes One of the worst things about the modern world is that everything that has ever been recorded can be abused. Pictures and videos can be deceptively edited to make it look like you said or did something that you didn't. Likewise, as generative AI has gotten better, deepfakes have become an entire industry. The last thing I want is a recording of mine being used in a way without my consent. I don't want anything I say to be clipped and sent to my boss, the news, or Libs of TikTok. I don't want my voice or likeness to be used to train an AI model. I don't want to see deepfakes of myself in a Discord server. These are things that should go without saying, but the easiest way for me to avoid these issues is to not record my teaching at all. Are these worries perhaps extreme? Maybe, but I don't think there needs to be a single nefarious actor. Once a video is made, all it takes is some web scraper to steal the video, and suddenly the genie is out of the bottle. Also, I highly doubt recordings are my intellectual property. I assume my place of work owns them. In that case, why even bother if the university can do whatever they want with the recordings? My university is already shilling for "Big AI," so it's only a matter of time before anything I do is fed into a generative AI model. Why give them even more data? Speaking of AI, it's one thing for a video of my teaching to long outlive me. It's another entirely for a machine learning algorithm to cut, splice, and amalgamate me into an educational slurry. Necromancy was supposed to be way cooler than this. I Don't Want to Violate Student Privacy These days, I think the vast majority of us understand that there really is no expectation of privacy anywhere you go. That said, there is a bit of legal protection that students have called FERPA. Much like the medical policy HIPPA, FERPA protects each student's academic record. FERPA protects students in a lot of interesting ways. For example, if a parent of a student contacts me, I am obligated to play dumb. I have to pretend like I don't know the student, or I at least cannot confirm that the student is in my class. While it's clear that tons of faculty record their lectures, I have to assume that they are in some way infringing on the rights of students through FERPA. When I looked this up, one source claimed that videos are okay "if a recording includes only the instructor or voices of students that are not personally identifiable, it is not a student education record, and FERPA does not limit its use." Therefore, as someone who goes out of their way to learn student names, I would likely be in violation of FERPA if I addressed a student by name during a recording. Likewise, every classroom is different and some of the cameras capture images of students, which would also likely violate FERPA. With that said, that same source claims that it's okay to share recordings with other sections of the course because the recordings only contain "limited use directory information." However, students may withhold their directory information, which would require the recording to be edited before distribution. I don't know about you, but I don't have the time to edit recordings in addition to the rest of my duties as an educator. Regardless, I see FERPA as the bare minimum expectation of privacy. Instead, we really ought to take privacy more seriously. It's a bit strange that we've let every moment of our lives be recorded. People deserve the right to be forgotten. I Don't Care for Hybrid Classes As soon as you open the door to recording your lectures, there's basically no barrier to streaming them. After all, you will most likely open a Zoom room to record the lecture in the first place, so you might as well share the link with your students. That's where I draw the line. Hybrid classes suck. There is no way to conduct a class which functions as well in one environment as it does in the other. You essentially have to plan two separate sections and somehow facilitate them simultaneously, and if you run discussion activities like I do, they just don't work. More realistically, both environments will suffer. The technology itself never quite works, and it's different in every classroom. Half the time the folks online won't hear you, and the other half the time they'll have their mic open to the world. As an instructor, you also have to balance checking the chat and teaching, and it's not even worth putting together breakout rooms. Not to mention that Zoombombing is still an annoying issue, and anyone can invite their AI companion in as a recording and transcription service. Recently, I've found that bots have been purposefully attending Zoom classes just to record them and re-post them on another site for purchase. What a strange world we live in. Ultimately, you can run hybrid meetings just fine, but I've never seen or personally had success with the hybrid environment for teaching. I'd rather have the entire class online or in-person; doing both is absurd. A Better Alternative to Recording Lectures Something that I have never done but would like to do is record lecture videos from the comfort of my home. That way, the videos are built in an online-first environment and would be more akin to the type of technical content you might watch on YouTube. In fact, I've done that before for my own site. I think this solves a lot of the problems I've mentioned above. For instance, the hybrid class model takes what's good about being in-person and being online and waters them down. The recordings you get in this kind of environment just aren't as good as a video created explicitly for the online environment. Not to go on a huge tangent, but to help you get inside of my head a little on this one: I often critique programming languages in a similar manner. In general, it's my belief that programming languages should maximize their strengths and not attempt to cater to everyone. Yet, as most languages gain popularity, they tend to lose their identity. Look at a language like Java which supports "functional" programming in a language that's built entirely around state. Look at a language like C++ which has so many features that no two developers will ever write the same program for the same problem. It's okay (and frankly, good) to pick a niche and stick to it. Recording YouTube-style videos also solves the problem of runtime. In other words, rather than watching a 55-minute lecture video where 75% of the time students are working on activities, you can just watch a 15-minute video that directly explains the material. I don't think these kinds of videos would be a replacement for in-person learning, but they could give a student a chance to review a lesson or two. Likewise, if I record a video at home, it's very easy to edit and sanitize the output. I don't have to worry about violating student privacy. I don't have to worry about making any off-handed comments. And, I don't have to worry about students being afraid to participate in class. The main problem at this point is time. If the university ever wanted to grant me some extra time and maybe money, I'd be willing to record some supplemental video content. Until then, I'll continue to share some of my peers' lecture videos instead. As always, thanks for taking the time to read this article! I'm actually writing this the morning of Thanksgiving as I've been spending a lot of time this week catching up on grades. Of course, I have a lot to be thankful for, but I'm very thankful for the folks who continue to read these articles in the age of short-form content and AI slop. Naturally, I'd love to have you continue to browse the site, but I won't be too greedy. Here are just a few choices: Experimenting With Hidden Prompts on Exams Yes, You Need General Education in College Higher Education Should Not Be a Job Training Program Likewise, feel free to check out the list of ways to grow the site. I just updated it to remove my Twitter and replaced it with my LinkedIn profile. Also, coil has been scrapped for a more direct PayPal payment link. Anyway, take care!