You get warned you're being filmed when you're in a fitting room, a public bathroom or just about any location where valuable items could get taken-and if Brandeis follows Yale University by videotaping lectures, there just may be signs in classrooms saying "video monitoring in progress." As recently reported by CNN.com and The Chronicle of Higher Education, Yale will soon be recording some classes and posting them online. Yale is following Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose online recordings receive up to 400,000 logins each month.

Imagine walking into class knowing everything is being recorded. Many students record lectures with their computers or tape recorders and find listening to these recordings very useful. If Brandeis allowed the option of viewing a class online, however, how would students respond?

For one thing, would this change help or hurt? In a technology-dependent world that already breeds very limited attention spans, such an option-intended as a supplement to class-may not have a satisfactory result. Students may substitute attendance with watching the lectures at their leisure.

How would tuition change if universities adopted this new form of class? Would accessing the recordings require an additional fee, or come complimentary with the education already paid for? If Brandeis followed Yale's model, then the recordings wouldn't be aimed at students actually in the classes, but at outsiders interested in those subjects. Therefore, there wouldn't be a fee, contrary to other online instruction aides such as Kaplan and Princeton Review.

Another difficulty lies in determining the criteria for choosing instructors to teach these courses. There is also the risk that video-recorded classes would become the norm, as new technology nearly always replaces conventional ways of doing things. Online courses and diplomas are accepted as merits just as worthy as those earned by physically going to college. Therefore, online class lectures could become substitutes for going to class, since both achieve the same result. Also, online lectures could easily get pirated onto audio file-sharing sites. That would certainly one-up note-passing.

Yale is hoping to avoid these concerns by teaming with Apple to form iTunes U, where professors can share their lectures as audio files through the company's software. In addition, the recordings will be shared only after the semester is over. These are all precautionary measures to avoid piracy.

Brandeis' online teaching aid, WebCT, is similarly a free informative site that connects students with additional Web sites, and provides students with their professor's and teaching aids' contact information. An additional Web-lecture service would be beneficial to Brandeis and would make sure students understand the beneficiary courses. A smart student wouldn't take WebCT, an online lecture guide and professors' office hours for granted.

Although this new method of teaching is keeping with the times, it's important that it acts as a resource and not a substitute. If Brandeis takes the technological initiative to promote online lectures, it must be just as cautious as the fitting room stalls, monitoring that education isn't being stolen.