Audio Recording within Education

-- By ElieShnerson - 2023

Canvas and Echo 360

During Spring 2023, Canvas and Echo 360 restricted access to students attempting to access class recordings using computer devices that disable cross-site tracking and cookies. [2] Canvas is an educational software that provides various features for educators and students. Many of which are invasive. [1] Canvas's implementation of Echo 360 allows students absent from class for reasons such as coronavirus exposure, religious observance, and bereavement to view classroom recordings. Additionally, accessing Echo360 through Canvas shows users that Canvas is attempting to track them across sites through security and advertising services such as Cloudflare, Google Analytics, and Heap. [12] After accepting cross-site tracking to gain access to classroom recordings, law students will read a new statement implemented in Spring 2023 stating that the "recording is intended for students registered in the course and not for public viewing." Moreover, "students cannot copy, forward, share, or allow anyone else to view or listen to class recordings." [13] These recordings often contain spoken content from these students, containing their thoughts and opinions regarding legal cases and broader policy issues. Moreover, Echo 360 creates and allows students to view a written transcript of the audio recording.

Growing demand for audio to text

Simultaneously, citizens have seen a similar desire from corporations hoping to bolster their "artificial intelligence" software with new additions like Openai's Whisper, which transforms audio into text. [4] These programs have scrubbed all the human information they can find and have been coded using a mass amount of text indexed from the internet. However, decades of human data are stored in audio and video, which has not been turned into text. To solve this, companies have promoted convenient services such as Whisper, which allows users to convert audio to text. Workers are excited to take their video conferencing, record it, and turn it into notes. At the same time, corporations are excited to gain access to video and audio data and have user feedback.

Legal Education

Within law school, entering first-year law students, students are forced or often pressured to use software such as Google (Drive, Mail, Docs,) Microsoft (Word, Groupme, Linkedin), Facebook's Whatsapp, and Zoom. After commencing classes, paying tuition, and signing leases, students are asked to sign multiple documents in Docusign, one of which contains the terms regarding consent to the recording, such as "The image(s) will remain the property of Columbia" and "Photograph or Photographs, include, but not limited to, still photographs, live-streaming, video tapes, film, digital, etc., taken of the undersigned and/or the family member of the undersigned." At other schools, even faculty are concerned. [7]

Classroom Participation

This creates an issue outside of usual education institution marketing, especially in law school during the "Socratic" method, in which law students face the Professor and get called on to answer questions about the assigned reading. According to rule 5.3.2 of the student handbook that students must sign an acknowledgment to, Columbia reserves the right to exclude students from their exam if they are unprepared to participate in more than one class per course. [11]

Positives

The Socratic method forces students to prepare to answer questions regarding dense readings on the spot quickly. It is beneficial, as students who become lawyers will have to answer to a judge or partner. Proponents of the Socratic method argue that law students could end up representing someone with their life on the line or a client with much money to lose. Additionally, preparing to speak publicly about something challenging helps individuals learn challenging material. [8]

Negatives

Legal institutions can pressure students to keep up with new and challenging material, usually without providing more than one graded or writing assignment. Many schools ask students to use microphones for course recordings during the Socratic method. Law students with hopes to work in the judiciary or politics are subsequently forced to answer questions regarding politically divisive cases on tape. Additionally, cameras and microphones record outside of class time, and recordings are often made during breaks, with voices heard far outside the view of these microphones.

Outside of career issues with student audio recordings

Recently, a new trend of malicious actors using audio recordings of individuals to create malicious deep fakes. [9] Audio recordings to scam people's relatives. [10]

Potential solutions

Schools should allow students to request that the audio from their voices be removed from these recordings, which might make it more timely and costly for others to access. Law schools could implement daily writing assignments for class participation as many lawyers will never have to speak on tape in front of various people randomly. Additionally, there should be more clarity regarding ownership of student voices as it is challenging to figure out who owns this audio.

Conclusion

Audio recordings are another way students with climbing debt cannot live without any guarantee of privacy. [12] Students, educators, and policymakers need to consider whether the potential negative implications of wide-scale audio recording outweigh their benefits. They must also explain whether educational institutions possess property rights in this audio.

Footnotes

[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/514555-student-privacy-pledge-delivers-neither-privacy-nor-enforcement/

[2] https://support.echo360.com/hc/en-us/articles/11062438116237-Recommended-Browsers

[3] https://echo360.com/privacy/

[4] https://openai.com/research/whisper

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

[6] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/4409311220621-Enabling-or-disabling-audio-transcription-for-cloud-recordings-

[7] https://www.theverge.com/21373669/recorded-lecture-capture-copyright-universities-coronavirus-fears

[8] https://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/blog/the-socratic-method-why-its-important-to-the-study-of-law/

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_deepfake

[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/05/ai-voice-scam/

[11] https://www.law.columbia.edu/academics/registration-services/academic-rules-procedures/rules-jd-degree/5-general-regulations

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[12] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/young_lawyers/publications/after-the-bar/student-loans-and-finances/student-loan-debt-fire-aba-young-lawyers/