Class

Students who miss more than a fifth of classes may fail their course, although faculty members can establish a higher bar, and excused absences are subject to approval from professors. Additionally, if students are unprepared to participate in class more than once per course, they can be barred from taking their final exam. Excluding first-year students from a final would lead to failure in the course, as first-year course grades are almost entirely based on one four-hour exam.

Cost/Benefit

Schools benefit from forced participation and attendance as students are incentivized outside of exams, and it is more efficient and economical only to have one grade. However, there are also costs associated with this technique, such as complaints from students and effort from faculty. One straightforward solution would be for schools to make compulsory participation more apparent during admissions or visits so that students witness it firsthand. Additionally, some faculty do not enjoy partaking, and schools could implement voluntary participation or daily writing assignments graded by teaching assistants as alternatives. Long-term writing assignments could also fix a broken evaluation system. Students benefit from compulsory participation as it prepares them for when a partner or judge might question them. Additionally, students benefit from improved time management and public speaking skills.

Law/Policy

Changes could be made to the language in the handbook relating to "one or more" as it seems too easy to hit and unfair. Also, there are no institutional accommodations for compulsory participation, as such drastic changes would fundamentally alter the pedagogical requirements of law school, which never occurs, and thus does not qualify as reasonable under the ADA. Changes could be made to public speaking qualifications under the ADA or to undergraduate requirements, state law, Section 504, and amendments to educational laws to specify public speaking.

Work

Life changes, such as with health, can occur randomly, altering an individual's daily life. This can drastically affect students owe money who are relying on employment, considering most employees can be terminated without cause.

Many law students pursue law school for the high salaries of law firms and forgo non at-will employment such as government jobs or attend the best law schools for firm work to secure a high-paying job. However, many law firm employees are also at-will.

Cost/Benefit

While pursuing a career at a firm, it is essential to remember that at-will employment will likely stay the same. Students can pursue non-at-will employment, as even a big law job does not guarantee to pay off all debt or survive massive inflation. Students can also pursue LRAP, which allows them to refrain from repaying if they spend a while working in public service or public interest law.

Law/Policy

Pushes for shared income agreements as an alternative to traditional student loans and changes to allow for the discharge of student debt in bankruptcy.

X

X

Audio Recording within Education

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.

This draft names some issues which we can now work more closely 5to understand. No actual legal rights or duties are assessed in the course of this draft. If there is some balancing of benefits and costs involved, it is not made clear what those are. Closer attention to legal detail and to the bases of policymaking are the routes to improvement in the next draft.

Footnotes

These should be links in the text. You are writing for the web: why make it hard for the reader?

[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

[X] Photo

[X] Photo

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

Audio Recording within Education - April 2023

Canvas and Echo 360

Growing demand for audio to text

Legal Education

Classroom Participation

Positives

Negatives

Outside of career issues with student audio recordings

Potential solutions

Conclusion

Footnotes

Paper Title

Section I

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

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