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Law in the Internet Society
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
The Need for a Plan B at Columbia Law School-- By MariaLedesma - 08 Dec 2021 The Need for a Plan B On December 7, 2021, an outage at Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), the largest cloud computing provider in the United States, left many users of its services in the dark. Among those who reported interruptions in their own services due to the outage were major streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, as well as companies like Coinbase and Sweetgreen. More importantly to me, the outage impacted the Columbia University community, particularly its Law School students. That is, among those who were directly affected by the interruption in services were students like myself, who either personally discovered something was wrong after being unable to access the Echo360 course recordings on CourseWorks? or who were made aware of the incident through an email from the Columbia Law School IT Helpdesk on Tuesday afternoon. Although cloud services will continue to reign supreme in the future, and undoubtedly play a role in the Law School’s continued technological growth, if there is one takeaway from this outage it is that the Law School needs to end its complete reliance on third party providers to record and store their courses, and should instead require its faculty to do so in the interest of their students. Alternatively, students should be allowed to audio record their courses, absent instructor approval, to prevent being unable to access them during the course of the semester. While my knowledge of the terms of the Law School’s relationship with third-party providers of educational tech services like Echo360, Inc. is limited, I am aware that the Law School relies heavily (although practically entirely is perhaps a more accurate description) on this company’s software to record and store its live courses. Students are then able to access these recordings through CourseWorks? . During the AWS outage, however, Echo360 experienced a system-wide outage. As the email from the IT Helpdesk to the Law School community detailed, “[r]ecordings are currently unavailable via the Echo360 website (echo360.org) and via the ‘Echo360’ tab in Courseworks, and new recordings cannot be scheduled for capture at this time.” Moreover, “[a]ccording to Echo360, the access issue appears to be linked to an outage at Amazon Web Services' (AWS) east coast servers. As such, this issue is affecting all US customers of Echo360.” With no timeline for resolution in sight, students were left in the dark as a result of the Law School’s complete reliance on this software to capture and record their courses. Given the likelihood that a cloud service like AWS and by extension Echo360 will experience another partial or total system failure in the future, the Law School should require its faculty to audio record their courses in the interest of their students. Just as the School now provides its instructors with microphones both to project their voices while teaching as well as for the purposes of the Echo360 recordings, the School should provide its faculty with voice recording devices to record their classes. Turning on one of these devices would be easier if not just as easy as turning on the microphones instructors currently use. Instructors could then either upload their individual recordings onto CourseWorks? or their own course website. Although I do not know how arduous or time-consuming a process like this would be, two alternatives come to mind in the event that instructors outright reject this idea. For one, their assistants could be tasked with uploading the recordings onto the relevant course site. Alternatively, instructors could be required to upload their recordings onto their sites only after becoming aware of a system outage like the one that took place on Tuesday. To be clear, they would still have to audio record their classes every day, but would only be required to upload the recordings after becoming aware of a system failure. While some sort of system would have to be put in place to ensure that the faculty is actually recording their courses even in the absence of a system failure, this seems like a feasible task. Overall, any of these steps would be better for students than the status quo that left students unable to access the recordings of their courses this week. Although I believe that instructors, rather than students, are better positioned to audio record and upload their recordings onto their websites for use by all registered students in a course, students should be allowed to audio record their courses if instructors refuse to do so. Today, however, Rule 5.3.4 of the Law School’s Academic Rules and Procedures states that “[v]ideo or audio recordings are not permitted to be made during classroom lectures except with the approval of the instructor.” Assuming that the above proposals are rejected by instructors, and given the likelihood that AWS and Echo360 will fail again, this rule should be amended to allow students to record their classes at all times for their own academic use absent instructor approval. In the likely event that another outage occurs, preventing students from audio recording their classes would not only hinder their ability to access course recordings to enhance understanding following a course but would significantly interfere with their ability to review recorded materials in preparation for final exams, as this outage likely did. As such, it would be in the best interest of students to allow them to audio record their courses going forward, if their instructors object to recording and making their courses available to students themselves. Without a doubt, cloud computing services like AWS and Echo360 will suffer system outages in the future. To guard against these system disruptions, the Law School needs to end its complete reliance on third-party providers to record and store their courses, and should instead require its faculty to do so in the interest of their students. Alternatively, students should be allowed to audio record their courses, absent instructor approval, to prevent being unable to access recordings during the course of the semester.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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