Why do professors want to make sure that their notes written on the blackboard will not be published?

Question

I am a university student and have recently found out how much easier it is to use my smart phone to take snapshots of notes professors write on the blackboard during lectures (since I am quite bad at understanding and writing at the same time, it is very useful).

To make sure the professors do not have problems with this, I asked each of them before starting to take pictures. They all had the same response: they are fine with it, as long as I do not make the shots publicly available. Of course, I have no intention of doing so. However, it made me think: why do professors emphasise this? All of the material is already public, tens of different lecture notes exist, some of the profs even made their own lecture notes freely downloadable for anybody.

So my questions are:

• How could bad quality pictures of the blackboard cause any harm to them?
• Why would it make a difference if I copied the content into my notebook or typed it in word by word and published that? (I have never heard any professors asking the students not to upload the notes, they write themselves during the lecture.)

Answer 1

The scribblings a professor writes on the board during a lecture represent the lowest-quality type of content that that professor will ever present in public: handwritten, hastily created under time pressure and at a time of high cognitive load, messy, unchecked, and prone to error. On the other hand, professors, like any other professionals, will much prefer to be judged by the highest-quality content that they produce, e.g., their research papers, which are carefully crafted over a long period of focus and concentration, digitally typeset, polished repeatedly, and double- and triple-checked for accuracy. So, to the extent that a professor gets to control which of the content they produced gets publicly released, they will almost never voluntarily consent to the release of the low-quality content.

An analogy that occurs to me is that of a movie actor: for precisely the same reason as I described above, actors prefer for the public to form its opinion of them through their movies, and not through a paparazzi photo of them taken while they were out shopping for groceries, wearing disheveled clothes, no make-up, a sloppy hairdo etc. So, if you don't want to be like a paparazzi, you will respect the wishes of your professor and not publicly post photos of their blackboard writings.

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Edit: I feel a need to clarify my remark about "lowest-quality type of content" and "hastily created [...] messy, unchecked, and prone to error". It seems that some people are reading this as a description of some kind of unprofessional professor who comes to class unprepared, delivers a poor quality lecture, then out of insecurity and fear of having their poor lecturing skills exposed publicly, refuses to allow pictures of their blackboard posted online. That is not quite what I meant (or at least is only one possible scenario covered by my answer). I was talking much more generally about any professor, whether excellent or poor, who comes to class, well-prepared or not, and delivers a lecture, which may be an excellent one, and then, for completely legitimate and rational reasons and not out of any insecurity, guilt, or shame, objects to having pictures of their blackboard posted online.

Why would they object if their lecture is so good? Some have asked. The logic behind this is that the blackboard scribblings, even of an excellent and well-prepared professor, will still be a type of content that was created during a very short amount of time (the time of the lecture), while the professor is busy doing several other things at the same time (talking to the class, figuring out the details of the math or whatever it is they are writing on the board, consulting their notes, keeping track of time, etc.), is under the psychological pressure of being watched by a large group of people (many people find this a stressful situation), and has no time or cognitive resources available to detect or correct small errors that may be introduced inadvertently, no matter how carefully prepared one is. So, in a purely relative comparison between this content and other kinds of content that the same professor creates (e.g., research papers, which as I've said are thoughtfully prepared over many months), blackboard scribblings are relatively speaking a low quality content. It is simply an unfair competition: two different kinds of content, two different quality standards, and for the reasons I explained, many professors quite reasonably prefer to have only one of the two types be posted publicly online.

Finally, note that all of this is not at all at odds with the fact that the blackboard writing can still be good or even excellent in the context of the lecture in which it is performed.

Answer 2

Several explanations are possible:

• Their blackboard scribblings are their copyrighted material, so they have every right to restrict distribution. I.e., written "for my students only".
• What ends up on the blackboard is just a part of the class, explanations, questions and answers, on-the-fly examples, reiteration of a missed point is an integral part of teaching. All that doesn't show up, so the result isn't really complete, and probably less than useful on its own.
• They don't want to get exposed publicly with stuff somewhat sloppily written on-the-fly, badly organized, with little (or no) possibility of checking/editing, and (probably worse) no careful citing of sources.
• They are secretly writing a textbook, and don't want to get their scoop stolen by a "pirate blackboard" version on the 'net ;-)

Answer 3

I think your question a bit naïve. Once you find yourself in the same situation as your professors, the answer will be obvious.

Just imagine that a junior student comes to you and asks you for some help, say, with a difficult math problem. Would you help him? I suppose you would. Most people would if they have the time and expertise. You'd spend an hour with him, hopefully solve the problem and explain the solution to him.

Now imagine that the same student tells you that he is going to publish all the notes and scribblings you make while you are working together on this problem. Anyone will be able to find them if they search for your name. It will be available on the internet, likely forever. You will have no control over it whatsoever, as you aren't even the one who published them. You won't be able to correct it if you find a mistake. It will contribute against your professional reputation, but if some stranger criticizes the notes, calls them wrong or hard to understand and useless, you will not have a chance to defend, clarify or correct them. It is not at all the same as when you were explaining the solution to your friend and you were having a discussion with him.

Would you still help this student if you knew he was going to publish the whole discussion? Maybe you wouldn't. Or maybe you would but you would only agree to publishing the notes if you get the chance to carefully correct and polish them, to make sure it is suitable for a general audience with whom you cannot engage interactively, and that you would have some control over where and how the notes get published so you can update them in the future if necessary. Of course preparing these notes is going to take a lot more time than the one hour discussion you'd need to explain the solution to just this one student. So you might easily decide that you don't have the time for such an endeavour.

Answer 4

As a professor, I want the class experience to be dynamic. If students had access to the content on the board, they might think it unnecessary to show up.

Also, writing notes results in a higher retention of information than just reading them (or typing them). http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/

Answer 5

In addition to the reasons given in the other answers, your professors will probably teach the same class again in a year or two and they don't want the next batch of students to have access to all the notes. There are good reasons for this:

Firstly, students could use past lecture notes to cheat on problem sets and exams. This could happen because next year the professor switches the example he or she went over in class with a homework problem. Or the professor might go over solutions to homework in class.

Secondly, if students have access to the lecture notes from previous years, they might decide not to come to class (or come and not pay attention). The usual student reasoning is ``I don't need to go to class, because I have access to all the information already.'' Unfortunately, those students end up doing poorly, because lecture notes don't adequately compensate for not coming to class. So sharing lecture notes with the next batch of students can be doing them a disservice.

Answer 6

One of the ways I find it helpful to think about questions like this is to ask "What's the benefit of the reverse happening?" Lets say that the professor not only allows you to take a photograph of the notes, but to share them online. What benefit is there?

Even leaving aside things like errors propagating through the notes, allowing the notes to exist online just lets a lesser form of their lecture notes (the blackboard, absent any context or the lecture itself) out into the world. What purpose does that serve? Who really benefits from it?

There are numerous downsides to it (as other people have discussed), and the upsides are pretty fleeting - at best, you could argue that the current class would be freed from taking notes, but many people prefer to take notes, and this creates a dependence that your camera, picture taking skills, and hosting will always be available and adequate to their needs.

Basically, ask yourself: "Why should they?"

Answer 7

I agree that, as in other answers and comments, faculty might not want "unedited, unengineered, live" performances to be recorded and exist forever on the introwebs.

At the same time, the "added value" (supposedly beyond books, Wiki, on-line stuff, even my own on-line notes produced for the very class itself) I aim to provide is something (I fancy...) cannot be captured by just "screen capture" of the blackboard, any more than a video without audio of a stage play would "be the play". Ok, so then a video+audio recording (I think they call these "movies") would maybe capture everything... just as movies do. Or video DVDs of orchestras playing music, as though that might substitute for "going to a concert".

In many ways, these substitutes are excellent. Cheaper, for sure. So one should ask about in what way, if any, they lack. That is, instead of worrying so much about prohibition of "pirated" videos of my lectures, I should ask myself what, if anything, I'm offering that these recordings don't capture...

Answer: not so much that very many people would care about. ("Oh, those silly people...")

For such reasons, I refused to be video-taped giving some popular courses of mine some years ago, when the university did not agree to give me sufficient IP (intellectual property) rights to not have my recordings replace me in my job... :)

The relevance of this ranting to the question is that many professors reasonably worry (whether or not they're good teachers at various levels) that their university or department will seek to replace them with cheap simulacra... possibly even just recordings of themselves... as I do suspect... and even tangentially related things are instinctively resisted, even if they're almost non-sequiturs.

In particular, unlike what even bad actors can expect, there are no "residuals" for replays of math videos. Maybe in the future. For the moment, "tenure" is the closest thing? :)

Answer 8

Any and all materials produced in a lecture are covered by copyright, intellectual property, and student conduct/academic integrity policies.

Materials for students available in university classes are not 'public' materials, and distribution of materials outside of the classroom goes against the policy, and may/may not be subjugated to copyright infringement law. Otherwise, why go to university if you get the education for free?

Technically, notes and other materials from units should not be reposted in any manner 'to help the next student' in accordance with these policies. It's a very grey area, however.

To give an example of when it happens and it's not so grey, I found an assessment of mine earlier this year (word for word, including tips on how to do the assessment well, and what the assessment marking criteria is) all over paid essay writing websites, with attached codes pertaining to the subject of my unit.

Answer 9

One additional point I haven't noticed above: at certain institutions (including mine), the copyright of the professors' teaching materials (including, strictly, their writing) does not solely belong to them: it belongs to the institution as well.

The logic behind this is as follows: the university pays the professor to create course material. However, the course itself (and the material) belongs to the university. The expression of that material depends on the professor, so they have a say in its use (I believe "performance rights" is the phrase). However, it remains the university's material.

This also explains why nobody worries about a student making open their notes on the course: the student's notes are their interpretation of the material, not that which was produced as a work for hire.

Answer 10

This is not a comprehensive answer, but it's too long for a comment. There are many possible reasons why professors would say this, but the one that I suspect is the most important is the following.

Many professors, as well as the schools that employ them, want to maintain the fiction that lecturing is a reasonable method of instruction in the year 2015. Lecturing originated in an era when books were too expensive for most individuals to own, so professors would read the book out loud, and students would copy down the words with a quill pen in order to have their own copy. This is a silly thing to do in 2015, and empirical evidence shows that for a variety of subjects, lecturing is not an effective way to teach, compared to the alternatives: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/08/1319030111 .

The trouble is that it would be inconvenient for professors and their employers to admit this. At big schools, it's very cost-effective to herd 300 students into an auditorium to watch a professor give a canned powerpoint presentation. Students also tend to uncritically accept lecturing as the normal mode of instruction, and often they dislike the alternatives, which would force them to prepare for class, play an active role, or risk having other people see them be wrong about something. And for professors, it's easy to deliver the same canned lecture year after year. "We pretend to teach, you pretend to learn."

If professors who use lecturing as their sole mode of instruction allowed their lectures to be posted for free on the internet, they would encounter an existential crisis. There would be no reason for them to keep showing up in person, semester after semester, and there would be no reason for their students to show up for class.

Answer 11

First, thanks for having the courtesy to ask for permission.

I think there are a couple of other things to consider:

1. Since all the professors answered the same way, there may be a department or university policy regarding posting content online.

2. "Harm" is relative to the individual and the situation. It could be financial, artistic, or social. At the end of the day, the content belongs to the professor and the university and they determine the usage.

3. Class notes are your interpretation of the knowledge disseminated in class. They are meant for personal use. When you post them online, veracity and/or plagiarism become your responsibility.

Answer 12

It seems that they do not want to be held to any mistakes, accidental plagiarism or misattribution, or inadequate explanations that they wrote during class.

Also, they may view publishing itself as a process of 'quality control' that lecture doesn't offer. Also in some fields there is a fear of being 'beaten to the punch' if something you are working on is made available before it is complete. Ideas are intellectual property and there is a fear of that property being stolen or unfairly adopted. Publication leaves a paper trail to resolve any potential disputes, so they tend to be avoided all together.