Personal Privacy and Intellectual Property

When using online learning tools, students must respect the privacy of their classmates and not share personal information about other students beyond the online classroom. Students must not share class recordings, transcripts, or links to lectures and discussion sessions with anyone who is not enrolled in the class, or teaching or supporting the class. While each student enrolled in a course should have access to all course materials and learning options, they should also remember they have an ethical responsibility as members of the Caltech community to keep this information private.

In traditional class room instruction, Professors can use copyrighted pictures, text and audio recordings as part of the instruction, and that use is protected under the copyright law because of the limited distribution of the material. In online classrooms, that protection is removed if any student records and publishes (for example, on the Internet) that copyrighted material. Students are expected to NOT publish, or make any part of the virtual classroom available to others.

Violations of these expectations may be considered violations of the Honor Code and of the Caltech Code of Conduct.

Recorded class sessions may be made available to students in the class, who must also log in using their access.caltech credentials. Neither instructors nor students are permitted to share these videos with anyone outside the class.

Students have various choices about how their images, voices, and information appear in class session videos. When making these choices, please consider the impact on learning and the sense of community in the class, which benefit from interacting with instructors and peers. For students not comfortable sharing their name, video, photo, and audio, there are Zoom settings to consider. Options in Zoom include: changing the way the text of one's name appears (e.g., first name only); turning off one's camera (NB: doing so will display a profile photo if provided in the profile settings); and typing in the chat window for questions and discussion.