This issue has recently been raised quite a bit at Skill, usually by
students who say that lecturers have refused to allow them to record
lectures on the grounds of copyright. We've had a bit of discussion here and
with some other organisations and we agree that the argument about copyright
for an individual lecturer doesn't stand up to scrutiny given that any
copyright in materials created during the course of their work will
generally be the property of the employer (the university or college) who
have also allowed the reasonable adjustment of the tape recorder in class.
(Although this does depend on the terms of the contract a lecturer has with
her/his college.)
However, as others have rightly said, students may well write everything
down verbatim if they know shorthand and there does not seem to be any
objection to this. Not allowing a recording may well be less favourable
treatment as well as failure to make a reasonable adjustment because the
disabled student may not have any other record of the lecture while the
other students will. This also applies to the issue of wiping tapes after
lectures ( a practice that some lecturers have required students to do) -
again this may be less favourable treatment come exam time when other
students have lecture notes to study from and disabled students don't.
There is also an argument that students who tape lectures have an unfair
advantage because they have a record of everything. However, again, some
students use shorthand so can take notes of everything also - in fact,
having all background noises, asides and ramblings is not always such a
great advantage!
All students should obviously be told to acknowledge their sources in the
normal way, whether they are books, the internet, lectures or discussions
and this hopefully should cover copyright or plagiarism concerns.
We have heard of one exception to this whereby if a student records a
discussion in a seminar and the very fact that the seminar is being recorded
may inhibit the discussion but this is unlikely to happen in the majority of
cases - perhaps only where very sensitive and confidential information is
being discussed. Thoughts?
Jenni Knox
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