Thread by @add_hawk

So I've been stuck on the camera policy for my Zoom classes. I totally get the worries about student privacy and invasiveness. But I also know that my teaching gets radically worse when I'm facing mostly all black squares. So this time, I tried complete honesty.

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My last term of Zoom/COVID teaching, I was totally convinced by the arguments that demanding cameras on was an invasion of privacy, that looking into a student's home life was a totally different matter from having them show up into your class.

I said, very directly, that I had no problems with cameras off. The result: all students left their cameras off, and I was left lecturing into a sea of black squares. I found this exhausting, isolating, miserable. And my teaching suffered badly, from lack of feedback.

I still don't want to force a camera policy on my students. (And at least one person I respect thinks, even without an official policy, "shaming" students for turning their cameras off is still bad mojo.) But it also feels like... students deserve to know that this is the result?

So I tried honesty this term. I told my students that I totally understood the privacy concerns, and that students were free to turn off their cameras - either all the time, or occasionally. And I said that I totally understood that their were hundreds of good reasons for it.

I also told them that, as the % of camera-off squares went up, that my teaching suffered. That a lot of my teaching involved responsiveness to student faces, of getting a constant read of what was and wasn't being understood.

I gave them my best estimates: that when less than 1/3 of students had their cameras off, there was no impact on my teaching. That I could feel a significant worsening at 1/2. And that once it got above 2/3 cameras-off, I felt wholly cut-off and unable to be responsive.

The result this term: my classes are staying mostly below 1/3 cameras-off. No policy, no further comments from me, no enforcement or pleading. And I think it's a bit self-regulating - sometimes the % of cameras-off drifts up, and then a few students will turn their cams back on.

This is light-years different from my last teaching term. I feel so much more alive, engaged, able to respond to students. I think I'm teaching like 300% better than the all-cameras-off era.

I briefly described what it felt like to talk for a long time into a blank screen. A bunch of students said that they had "never even thought" about what it felt like from the teacher's POV, to teach to a bunch of no-camera squares.

My hope is that what's going on is: students who have a strong reason to have cameras off, have them off. But that many people have only a mild preference for having their cameras off, which is now being outweighed by some sense of a communal good, which I made salient.

(I mean, that's my experience in various Zoom audiences. I would almost always mildly prefer to go camera-off, but now I go camera-on most of the time, except when I have some stronger reason, because of my sense of what it does for the speaker.)

I know there are still lots of people out there who think that *any pressure* on students to turn their cameras on is a no-no. But I think it's a... informed choice issue, or something like that.

It's just a fact that my teaching will get worse as more cameras go off, and students at least deserve to know that and take it into account, in their choice.

Finally: heavy "YMMV" notice. Tiny sample size. This term I'm teaching only a mid-level course of mostly philosophy majors, and an upper-level undergrad seminar / grad seminar. Class size is 15 & 25. I have no idea how this would play in different places, or to intro audiences.