Class Recordings Required for Accreditation?

[Zeus Bird]

Has anyone heard of accreditation requirements that mandate that all of a university's classes be recorded and made available online?  This is in response to an administrative claim made at our uni. 

[the_geneticist]

Hmm, that's new to me.  I'd ask for documentation of where they found that requirement.  It does mean that every single student who's voice could be heard or face could be seen will need to fill out a consent form.  In general, instructors may only record themselves and need explicit permission to record their students.
The administrator may think that all your classes are one-way lectures with no student interactions or input.  We had a dean float the idea that if the TAs simply recorded their discussion classes that we could re-use the recordings and not need to pay for future TAs.

[Zeus Bird]

Thanks.  According to state laws, we are a "one party consent" state, so I'm not sure how that factors into our administration's thinking re consent here.  They may try to make the consent consequent on the initial enrollment in any course during this fall semester.

[spork]

Has anyone heard of accreditation requirements that mandate that all of a university's classes be recorded and made available online?  This is in response to an administrative claim made at our uni.

No. And if you look at your accreditor's standards, there is probably no mention at all of recording classes. But universities are frantically trying to preserve enrollment by claiming that any face-to-face instruction will be available to remote students in the form of live streamed and recorded video, and that the experience of the students not in the classroom will be "the same" as the experience of those who are in the classroom. Which isn't going to happen. But universities are installing expensive equipment anyway, so that students can watch unedited video of a dark image of an instructor standing in front of the classroom. Because we all know that that's what college teaching is all about.

[pink_]

I think it probably depends on the accrediting body, but I haven't heard of it for ours (SACS-COC).

[polly_mer]

HLC had no such requirements when I was doing accreditation and online education.

I would ask the administrator to provide a reference for such a requirement because I was immersed in online rules and best practices for a few years a few years ago and never encountered that. 

Things might have changed since online instruction was a daily concern for me, but I have not seen any of the pushback in media or social that proposing such a requirement would incur.

[San Joaquin]

WASC still shudders at the prospect of video evidence, so I'm guessing it wasn't them.

[kaysixteen]

It is also interesting to know what the copyright issues here would be, namely does the professor retain copyright for his lecturers, if/ when the uni requires them to be recorded and placed on line?  In any case, it does appear that this is but one case of uni administrators in the covid era panicking and flailing, and trying to figure out how to keep the lights on, etc., and I suspect it will not be the last....

[polly_mer]

Regarding copyright, check your employment contract/faculty handbook for the term 'work-for-hire'.  It's possible that faculty don't have sole copyrights to their work performed as part of their employment.

[dr_codex]

Hmm, that's new to me.  I'd ask for documentation of where they found that requirement.  It does mean that every single student who's voice could be heard or face could be seen will need to fill out a consent form.  In general, instructors may only record themselves and need explicit permission to record their students.
The administrator may think that all your classes are one-way lectures with no student interactions or input.  We had a dean float the idea that if the TAs simply recorded their discussion classes that we could re-use the recordings and not need to pay for future TAs.

Both of these. We routinely have students fill out a consent form for photos, which has always made me uneasy. Consent to record them probably does not include consent to broadcast the recordings publicly, although it might be allowed in a password-protected course shell, exclusive to students who register for the course.

Kaysixteen brings up copyright, which can sometimes also be finessed within a controlled educational environment.

Neither of these are small issues, but the big one for me is the notion that "lectures" are like podcasts or YouTube videos. I'm really struggling with making my classroom materials accessible to distance learners, in large part because I got away from the "script" model almost the moment that I was no longer speaking to actual lecture halls. My "notes" are prompts, not monologues, and much of the direction of any given session will depend upon what that group of students brings to the table.

I find it hard enough to get students to give candid answers. If I announced that classes were being recorded, it would have a chilling effect.

I am having analogous arguments, outside of the classroom, with a volunteer organization that I help to run. Some people want to use recorded Zoom sessions to track down participants in open meetings, in order to send them emails, etc. I think that's super creepy, and refuse to do it.

[clean]

Last weekend I dealt with the hurricane.  it looks like this week is your turn.Are you ready?  (Have you stocked up on TP?? That seems to be the most important commodity in an emergency these days!)
Hopefully, your experience will mirror mine.  I was out of electricity for only about an hour.  
Good luck!
Gene

For what it is worth....
Our Office of Distance Learning has to approve classes if they are to be exclusively online.  They will not approve  the use of lectures IF they include WebEx files with students visible in the frame. 
The office also wants everything captioned.  One suggestion is that the files be made YouTube files as somehow youtube will caption them, though I understand that you have to go through the output to edit words and grammar/punctuation.  However, some faculty will do their recordings, but not post them in the blackboard shells. Instead, they will email the current students the link.
The fear is that IF they put it in the shell, that some admincritter down the road will simply allow the prior class shell to be copied and provided to another faculty or adjunct, and the recording faculty member's work, voice and picture/'likeness' will be used by someone else (without compensation).

So these faculty  will submit the material for approval, but not allow it to be added to the course shells. 

Good luck to you!  I suggest that the OP, if this push continues, asks for the specific regulation that requires the recordings. 

[Zeus Bird]

OP here. 

Thanks everyone for your very helpful replies.  We now have definite word from the accreditor that class recordings are NOT required for accreditation. 

While that was good to hear, the trust deficit between faculty and administration here grew that much larger. 

[Aster]

Various admin-critters at Big Urban College routinely fabricate "mandatory requirements for faculty" that "we have no control over because the accreditor requires it."

In 4 out of 5 of such instances, there never is any such accreditor requirement. The admin-critters are either blindly passing along faulty information from other admin-critters, or the admin-critters are blame-shifting themselves out of some ridiculous homemade policy that some local wonk cooked up.

So whenever I now hear "accreditor requirement" from anyone at my institution, I immediately think the opposite.

[polly_mer]

To be fair,
(1) Accreditation requirements do change and what is proposed at the national meeting may not make it through the whole process to the current iteration of the official requirements.

(2) The peer corps does reviews.  Thus, while the members of the peer corps may be representing the accreditor, the individuals involved are just faculty and administrators from other institutions who took some training.  They are not officials at the accrediting body.

(3) New administrators who aren't themselves up on all the rules can easily interpret a suggestion (in jest or not) as a requirement because they don't know any better.  People who come up from the faculty ranks are particularly prone to latch on to one suggestion of how an institution might show compliance in one area and then roll out a whole set of 'accreditor-required practices'.