A professor at my university has recently started grading students partially based on assignments delivered as YouTube videos. These assignments are basically the usual exercises that a teacher would give students for practice or to hand-in for grading. Students however, are being required to film the problem solution paper and explain it, so the voice is recorded but the students face may be left out of the video.
This raised my brows, so I'd like to inquire about the good practices around it, particularly:
Should it be publicly or privately posted on YouTube? From my understanding, the videos are being made public.
What advantages with respect to simply asking for the paper to be handed physically or scanned and e-mailed?
Does it provide good proof of authorship? I.e. people can hardly re-use a handwritten paper delivered to the teacher, but knowing that the student's face is not on the video and the teacher may not recognize the student's voice, I'm unsure it gives reasonable confidence that the student is behind the microphone doing the work. Maybe a student reposts an old (deleted) video if the exercise has been used in the past.
It this nice for one-shot experiences, or is it functional for continued usage? I.e. could a teacher give the same video assignment over several years? Possibly with the same exercise problems?
Are there any intelectual property or image rights concern? I.e. for music/movies, performers/actors are continuously paid for exhibitions of their performances, while intellectual properties such as the contents of one's thesis are often waived to the university. What if these videos are later included for paid online courses?
Is there any advantage for the professor with respect to simply asking the video file to be delivered on a Dropbox folder or similar cloud storage method?