MOSCOW, November 6 (RIA Novosti) — Harvard University is facing criticism after revelations that it used cameras placed in classrooms in order to photograph students’ attendance at class, without gaining their permission.
“Just because technology can be used to answer a question doesn’t mean that it should be. And if you watch people electronically and don’t tell them ahead of time, you should tell them afterwards,” said Computer Science professor Harry R. Lewis when asking the university’s Vice Provost about the practice.
The surveillance took place as part of a research study under the remit of the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, which aimed to get data on student attendance. According to the response from Peter K. Bol, Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, anecdotal reports about increasing numbers of students skipping class and taking less notes “raised questions about the effectiveness of lectures as a way of helping students learn and suggested that there might be some value in exploring how new media and pedagogical techniques might be used by faculty.”
The issue came to light at a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Meeting at the university on Tuesday, when Lewis asked Bol about reports he had heard about the study from two of his untenured faculty colleagues, who had been informed after the fact that their courses had been part of the study. After the meeting Lewis published both his question and the Vice Provost’s answer on his blog page.
“Contrary to a basic principle of research involving human subjects, the students who were subjects of this study still, I believe, have not been informed that their images were captured and analyzed,” said Lewis in his question.
In the course of the study, cameras were installed in lecture halls to take images of the audience, which were then put through a computer program that counted the empty and filled seats. The data was then shown to course heads, after which, Bol says, it was destroyed. Bol added that course heads could choose whether the data itself was kept or destroyed.
According to university paper the Harvard Crimson, University President Drew G. Faust, after hearing Bol’s explanation, gave her intention to refer the study to an oversight committee already established at the university, saying "I indeed do take very seriously the important questions that this incident raises."
The oversight committee was established at the university following last year’s discovery that Harvard had secretly examined the email accounts of 16 university teaching staff. The Boston Globe reported that IT staff had been instructed to search message headings in the accounts, with the aim of finding out the source of a leak to the media.
