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September 15, 2006

Pedagogy, Policy, and Podcasting

There are a host of issues that people have brought up to me about, in my particular instance, podcasting, and that I have discovered in my research that would merit consideration in any policy document for the school, or the University, and professors. The issues break out roughly along the lines of pedagogy, that is, how teachers believe they do and should influence their students, three legalistic domains -- copyright, libel, and employer-employee relations, and, finally, technical issues.

Pedagogy

- "Students may face unforeseen circumstances, such as sickness, a meeting with a dean, or personal financial or housing affairs, that prohibit class attendence." This seems to be a prima facia good argument.

- "Students with learning disabilities may benefit to benefit greatly by having access to audio outside of a classroom setting." Again, this seems to be obviously good.

- "Professors must impose a schema, a framework for knowledge, on the lecture material." This ties in with the next statement.

- "Students need one schema in which to place the material they learn." The upshot of this is the students can't avoided the lecturer's schema. Many students don't attend class because they find that professors imposing their schema, however temporarily, destabilizes the fragile schema the student is trying to build using other sources. Too many schemas, too many frameworks, make a bush, instead of a building. A bush won't hold the first brick.

- "Even very bright students have a hard time parsing high level visual input (text-and-diagram slides) and audible input of the lecturer's voice, at the same time." This exists in parallel with the issues of schema, and it is almost totally unavoidable, unless one goes to lecture and covers their eyes. This also causes students to not go to class because their information transfer rate that asymptotically approaches 0. This is a matter of information overload. It is simply to much; people shut down.

- "I believe this offers another excuse for students to not go to class." Hopefully, but even still, we haven't seen a dramatic drop in class attendence simply because the audio is recorded. Indeed, popular lecturers get more attendance and more downloads.

- "I believe this will cause the class's USMLE board scores to go down." Maybe it will. Maybe they will go up. We don't know.

- "I believe more students will have consumed the lecture material before practicals and labs." No one but me has stated this, but it seems intuitively obvious.

- "I believe podcasting will lead to students who are less prepared for their clinical years." Again, we don't know one way or another.

- "I believe lecture is one of the more effective methods for learning the material." No one has actually said this. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.

- "I believe it is fair and reasonable to only allow the noteservice, a for-profit business to which not all students subscribe, to have exclusive access to recordings of my lectures." This was one professor's defacto position, but I think it was only a consequence of not having had the time to thoroughly think it through.

- "I believe that the presence of a digital recording will inhibit me from providing my students the best possible lecture performance." This has not proven to be the case. Ask me about Dr Jeter's joke.

- "I believe that the presence of a digital recording will challange me to provide my students the best possible lecture performance." I'm not sure this is the case either, but wouldn't it be nice if it were?

- "I don't want students to hear old material." This goes to the technology issues discussed below, but it certainly seems reasonable to dispose of the lectures after each class's preclinical years. That is, the first anatomy lecture should be up until the last student has finished USMLE Step 1.

- "I flat out don't want to be recorded." In so far as it is your performance, then that is your right to reserve.

Copyright

- "I can't trust every student to not unlawfully distribute my lecture, which I feel is my intellectual property protected by law." Copyright historically almost perfectly excludes educational material from copyright. It is the permanant, physical product which is protected. Copyright is a matter of commerce, not scientific knowledge.

- "I believe the possibility of a student distributing my lecture once he or she has possession of the digital recording provides unfair access to information to people other than my paying students." This goes to the technical issues below, as well as the legitimate desire to have everyone on the same page. It is not unreasonable, in my opinion, to ask students to sign an agreement acknowledging their responsibilities. It would be better, in my opinion, to have site protected with personally accountable university network passwords, instead of directory-local ht-access passwords.

- "I believe the possibility of a student distributing my lecture once he or she has possession of the digital recording provides people other than my paying students unfair access to my performance." This is, in theory, the copyrightable issue, the performance. The factual knowledge is not copyrightable. However, if anything, one would expect professors to endorse the widest scope of fair use possible as they and their students are the historical victims of copyright exclusivity. Nevertheless, it does seem reasonable to personalize the students' responsibility.

- "I believe the possibility of a student distributing my lecture once he or she has possession of the digital recording creates a risk of disclosing trade secrets that I share in my lectures, and that such action would jeopordize a business." This is an entirely different subject, and the professors are the ones assuming responsibility if they are disclosing trade secrets without pre-existing confidentiality agreements.

- "I would consent to podcasting of my lectures over a secure university .edu server if and only if the school of medicine or the university had a published policy on the matter." I suppose that's what this is about.

- "I would consent to podcasting of my lectures over a secure university .edu server if and only if the school of medicine or the university required all students to sign a statement of understanding that clearly defined their obligation to protect the digital recording of my lectures." As above, I suppose this is reasonable, though it seems to me there are other ways to raise the stakes without making people sign vaguely worded statements, and all such statements become vague in the end.

Libel

- "I may use offensive language in class which I do not want to be taken out of context." This is protected under current libel statutes, and, frankly, I think it is a relatively weak argument when compared to other arguments because the professors probably aren't to concerned about what could, in theory, be taken out of context. Professors are people who negotiate their lives with other people who are smart enough recognize something that doesn't fit the pattern and to then seek out contextual clues. And, even if the members of the professor's social circles don't seek out contextual clues, the victim is protected by libel laws, and the basic moral principles behind libel. Even this, however, is highly theoritical simply because we have no evidence of it happening in the context of podcasted lectures at Tulane. Admittedly, this is a relatively selective sample, but it's what I've got. I know professors have said things off-color in lecture before. I was there. It takes no podcast to propogate that fact. However, the possibility that the podcast itself would serve to bolster an act of libel assumes that anyone would pass the extraordinarily high barrier to access the material to begin with. Either the password has to be hacked by brute force, and then the person has to listen to a LOT of lecture, or the perpetrator would have to aquire the recording from someone who does have access, thus creating a trail of evidence, a high risk endeavor indeed. In either case, the perpetrator then has to lift the appropriate segment out of context and place it in a misleading context. This seems highly unlikely, when considered in the context of all the other things any given person might do in their day.

Employer-Employee Relations

- "A supervisor told me I had to allow podcasting lectures." This seems to be within the employer's perview, but I'm not sure how the delegation of authority works out amongst the faculty.

- "A supervisor told me I was to not allow podcasting of my lectures." Ditto.

- "I believe my usefulness to the organization will be jeapordized if my lectures are recorded even once, thus making them available to future classes." It seems fair and reasonable that the content should be taken down at the end of that year's pre-clinical years.

Technical

- "I am confident in the security of ht-access password protection." Well, ht-access is far from the gold standard of internet security. It relies on one login and one password for an entire group, so there is no personal accountability. It is also unencrypted, so packet-sniffers could get the information if they really wanted it. The gold standard is the SSH protocol. This is ripe for future implementation.

- "I find the technical aspects of recording the lectures, as handled by the students, to be cumbersome." This is what is addressed by having 'student-helpers' who deal with the wires and buttons.

For more, here's the Creative Commons Podcasting Legal Guide and Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use site.

Posted by Niels Olson at September 15, 2006 2:04 PM

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Posted by: TheBizofKnowledge at September 15, 2006 7:18 PM

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