Class Recordings – Best Practice

Recordings for Class Use Only.  If your objective in recording a class session is simply to make an archived recording available to people who need it for the class—enrolled students and instructors and their supporting personnel—it is sufficient simply to provide notice (1) that you are recording the class and (2) for what purpose.  

Recording for Broader Audiences.  If you have recorded a class session for student access, and you subsequently have reason to make a class session recording more broadly available—i.e., to persons outside of the class—then student privacy considerations require, as a legal matter, that any students who appear and are personally identifiable in the video must provide written consent to that disclosure.  This holds true as well in the case of saved written transcripts of the class if students are named in the transcript or are identifiable from context. The written consent should consist of a description of the disclosures you will make outside the class, including to whom, by what means, and for what purpose.  It is sufficient if students simply respond “yes” to an email that includes these details and asks if they will consent to the disclosure.

If you have questions about the federal privacy law governing student records, you should contact the Office of the General Counsel.