If you want to observe trouble brewing, look at the conversation surrounding videotaping lectures and posting them online. I’ve been doing this for four years, ever since I started my faculty job. At the the time I was the only faculty member at UB that was doing this. In the computer science department. I thought that that was a bit odd, but faculty can take a while to change.

Four years later? Now there are two of us 1. At that rate, in 50 years all of the lectures in my department will be posted online. Just in case you didn’t notice, I work in the computer science department. So let’s assume that there isn’t a technology gap here. I don’t know if I completely believe that, but let’s just assume for a minute that my fellow computer scientist faculty members can all manage to post content on YouTube—along with children and millions of people with strange cats. So why don’t they?

I’ve heard a variety of things. I’ve noticed a strange tendency in academia to act like videotaping lectures is a huge project which requires a special room, an expensive camera and cameraperson, expensive editing software, a university website dedicated to hosting the videos, etc. Of course, that’s not true. My rig is a halfway-decent camera and lapel mic that cost maybe a few hundred dollars a few years ago. One of my teaching assistants sets it up at the beginning of class and cleans up afterward. After class I have a bit of tooling that I use to title, brand, transcode, and upload the videos—​but that’s optional. It takes maybe five minutes of my time, and it could be done by a teaching assistant 2.

Another argument I hear is that videotaping lectures and making materials available online will discourage students from coming to class. And it will. If your goal is to have warm bodies in class, not posting any of the course content anywhere online will achieve that. Of course people may be fooling around online 3, sleeping, or just generally not paying attention—​but who cares! There they are, and if that’s your goal, that works.

I consider it my job to make it compelling for students to attend class by giving funny, informative, and engaging lectures.But if you goal is to help students learn I think you make things as widely available as possible. Students miss class for all kinds of reasons, many of them legitimate, and they use online videos for review and reinforcement—​not just as a way to avoid attending class. Overall trying to control attendance and what students do in class just seems like a losing battle, and also fundamentally not aligned with respecting students agency. I consider it my job to make it compelling for students to attend class by giving funny, informative, and engaging lectures. Students are free to attend or not, depending on what works best for them.

This also reduces load on the course staff. I hear a lot of complaining from colleagues about the amount of time they spend interacting with students, but if there isn’t a well-organized website that you can redirect students to you are going to send a lot of repetitive email. (And given the number of emails that you receive with those "Sent from my mobile device" footers, maybe a website that isn’t completely unusable on mobile would also help.)