Message from the Association President

Dear Colleagues,

Below is a summary of recent advice and guidance provided by Faculty Relations and LTSI about recording and downloading lectures.

Recording and Downloading Lectures

The advice about recording lectures for online learning is to ideally record in 15 minute chunks, so that online lectures can be broken up with more interactive learning.

There are various methods of recording lectures:

• Self-record using Zoom or Kaltura, in advance or during class. For a full set resources for online recording and instruction/lectures please click here.
• For the fall, for those who are teaching face-to-face, you also have the option of requesting a professional videographer to record classroom sessions, for those students who cannot attend in person. If you want to do this, contact Systems via this link. Recording needs to be booked, preferably before the start of the term. If you are teaching face-to-face, the fee will be covered by the central administration. If you are teaching online and want to access this service, your unit or Faculty will have to cover the costs.

Student Consent for Recording Lectures and Class Discussions

If you are going to record a lecture or class discussion, you must first notify students and explain the purpose. Notification only is required and students do not need to provide consent for recording. For more details please see “How can I record my session and share it with students?” in the FAQ section for Zoom on the TeachAnywhere site.

Members have asked whether they can be required to record their lectures and/or class discussions.  The Administration advises that while the recording of courses is not generally required, faculty are asked to attend to accessibility issues for students who need alternate formats or who cannot be physically in the classroom due to COVID-19 related travel restrictions or illness. At this time, most recordings are being done to provide students with course material who cannot participate synchronously (particularly because of issues with time zones).

If you do not wish to record your lectures, you may need to provide clear reasons as to why recording is not appropriate or viable, and you will still be required to provide equally detailed material to students in another form, which would increase your workload. If you have any questions or concerns about this matter, please contact our Membership Services Officers:

Reuben Kellen – [email protected]

Ben Johnson – [email protected]

Student Downloading and Posting of Course Materials

LTSI is developing technical solutions that will address issues related to students downloading and posting course materials in unauthorized ways and will be informing students through various platforms that such actions constitute violations of University policy.

Brightspace provides a download button on some content pages for students to more easily print or save materials. The purpose is to increase accessibility – for example to allow for notetaking and annotation or for working offline when an internet connection is not readily available. It’s important to note that web materials can be saved/printed in a variety of ways (e.g. web browser, screen capture). Brightspace does allow some files to be viewed right on the page which helps to keep information in Brightspace automatically (whereas in CourseSpaces some had to be downloaded to be viewed).

In relation to content pages, if you have particular concerns you could post pages and file content elsewhere (e.g. on the OAC or on One-Drive) and provide a link to it instead of uploading it directly to Brightspace. In relation to video, when you upload videos into Kaltura in Brightspace, you can choose whether or not to allow students to download (the default is set to off: no downloading). Further instructions are available here under the question “How can I control whether or not a video can be downloaded?”

All the best,

Lynne

Lynne Marks

President

University of Victoria Faculty Association

Email: [email protected]