Multimodal selfies: designing a multimodal recording device for students in traditional classrooms

The traditional recording of student interaction in classrooms has raised privacy concerns in both students and academics. However, the same students are happy to share their daily lives through social media. Perception of data ownership is the key factor in this paradox. This article proposes the design of a personal Multimodal Recording Device (MRD) that could capture the actions of its owner during lectures. The MRD would be able to capture close-range video, audio, writing, and other environmental signals. Differently from traditional centralized recording systems, students would have control over their own recorded data. They could decide to share their information in exchange of access to the recordings of the instructor, notes form their classmates, and analysis of, for example, their attention performance. By sharing their data, students participate in the co-creation of enhanced and synchronized course notes that will benefit all the participating students. This work presents details about how such a device could be build from available components. This work also discusses and evaluates the design of such device, including its foreseeable costs, scalability, flexibility, intrusiveness and recording quality.