Privacy and Lecture recordings

Recordings of lectures and other course activities are very valuable to students, both for review and for flexibility when there are classes you cannot attend in person.

Recordings of teaching and learning activities is formalised in ANU policies and procedures

• Policy: Recording of teaching activities
• Procedure: Recording of teaching activities

To facilitate this, the Echo360 Active Learning Platform is installed in many of the ANU teaching rooms and is scheduled to automatically record the lectures, seminars and lectorials timetabled into those spaces.  Also, a growing number of rooms are equipped with cameras and microphones to enable online interactivity, especially dual delivery classes, which simultaneously include some students present in person while others participate online.

As a consequence, as a participant you need to be aware of impacts this may have on your privacy.  ANU is committed to protecting people's privacy, in compliance with the ANU Privacy Policy.

Echo360

Rooms with Echo360 installed are designed to record the lecturer's voice along with any video displayed through the room's data projector. This generally will not pickup other sounds in the room, but it is possible that other voices may be captured. Where there is no camera, only the video from the data projector is recorded, no participants in the room will be captured.

Echo360 recordings are automatically scheduled to commence five minutes after the timetabled start of a session and continue until five minutes before the end of the session, e.g. 10:05 am - 10:55 am for a 10:00am lecture. Usually these recordings are then published for all course participants, through Wattle. It is also possible for an Echo360 recording to be started manually (known as an ad hoc recording). Echo360 may also be used to Livestream sessions to online participants.

Dual Delivery

A growing number of teaching and learning spaces are being equipped with cameras and additional microphones to support whiteboard capture, dual delivery and other forms of online interactivity. In these rooms, the audio of the whole room, and video which may include participants, may be shared on the internet and may be recorded either in the Echo360 system or on other platforms including Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

Letting students know

Course outlines should include information about the nature of recordings intended for the course.  Lecturers are encouraged to include a slide informing students if an automated recording is taking place.  Both a light template and dark template of the privacy notice slide is available. Also, lecturers should tell students if they are about to manually commence a recording, and give them an opportunity to avoid having their face or voice recorded.

Privacy concerns

If you are concerned about your voice or image being captured and shared in this process, or if there is some audio or video you need removed from a recording, please discuss this with your course convener.  If your valid needs cannot be met in this way, please contact Access and Inclusion to discuss other possible solutions.