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Automatic Lesson Recording: What Clasify Records, and Who Can Watch It
By Clasify Team · · 7 min read
Most academy owners go looking for lesson recording on a bad day. A parent says their child's teacher spent the session on the wrong surah. A new hire's students keep quietly drifting away and nobody can say why. Two people remember the same lesson differently and there is no way to settle it. Until that day, recording sits somewhere near the bottom of the list; after it, it moves to the top.
Clasify records lessons automatically. It is off until you turn it on, it is decided one teacher at a time, everyone in the room is told while it is happening, and only academy admins can watch it back. Each of those is a deliberate choice, and each of them changes what the feature is useful for. Here is exactly what it does.
What actually gets recorded
When a teacher you have enabled starts a lesson, the browser captures the session as it appears in the room: the teacher's camera and the screen they are sharing, composited into one frame, with the room's audio. If nothing is being shared, you get the camera; when a screen share starts, it takes the larger part of the frame and the camera sits alongside it.
It is captured at 854×480 — 480p, fifteen frames a second — and that is a deliberate trade rather than an oversight. A lesson records for the whole of its length, so frame size is really a storage decision: a sharper frame would push an hour of class toward a gigabyte, and recording bytes count against your plan's quota. The cost is legibility. The shared screen is drawn into the top portion of the frame, so fine text — dense slides, code, small print on a scanned page — can look soft on playback. Expect to see what a lesson was and how it was taught, not to read every word that was on the screen.
The result is one continuous video with one timeline, not a folder of thirty-second fragments. You can scrub a forty-minute lesson to minute twelve the way you would expect. If the teacher's connection drops mid-lesson and comes back, capture resumes into the same recording rather than starting a second one — one lesson is always one recording.
It is off until you turn it on, one teacher at a time
There is no academy-wide switch, and nothing records by default. Recording is a per-teacher setting: open a teacher in your Teachers list and turn on Automatic Lesson Recording for that person. From then on, their lessons record without them having to remember to press anything — which is the only version of this that works, because the lessons you most want a record of are never the ones anyone thought to record.
Per-teacher is the right granularity for how academies actually use this. You will almost certainly want it on for a teacher in their first two months, and off for the one who has taught for you for six years. You may want it on for a class where a parent has raised a concern, and nowhere else. Turning it off later stops future lessons recording; it does not touch what has already been captured.
Everyone in the room knows
While a lesson is recording, every participant sees a recording notice in the room — the teacher, the students, and anyone else who joins. It is not buried in a settings page or a terms document nobody reads.
This is not a nice-to-have. You are recording classrooms that mostly contain children, and depending on where your students live, recording someone without telling them can be anything from a support ticket to a legal problem. Making the notice unavoidable, and making it part of the feature rather than a policy you have to remember to enforce, is the only version that stays safe as you grow past the point where you personally know every family.
You still owe your families a plain answer about it. Tell parents at enrolment that lessons may be recorded, who can see the recordings, and how long you keep them. The product handles the notice in the room; the relationship is yours.
Only academy admins can watch it back
Playback is restricted to your academy's admins. Not students. Not parents. Not even the teacher who taught the lesson.
That last one surprises people, so it is worth being direct about why. A recording of a lesson is video and audio of your students. Once a teacher can re-watch and replay footage of the children they teach, outside the lesson and outside anyone's view, you have created a category of access that is very hard to justify to a parent and very hard to supervise. Keeping playback with the academy's admins keeps that footage inside the smallest group that can still act on it.
Recordings live in your academy's own space. Another academy on Clasify cannot see, list or reach them, in the same way it cannot reach your students.
What this is not: a catch-up library for students
Because playback is admin-only, recording is not a way for a student who missed Tuesday to watch Tuesday. If that is the problem you are solving, this is not the feature that solves it — the missed lesson is handled elsewhere in Clasify, by the student logging an excused absence with a reason, which keeps it out of their completion rate and puts it in front of the teacher and the admin.
What recording is genuinely good for is narrower and more valuable:
**Coaching new teachers.** Watching twenty minutes of a real lesson tells you more about a new hire than any number of check-in calls. It is the fastest way to find the teacher who is technically correct and completely unengaging before their students quietly leave.
**Settling disputes with evidence.** When a parent's account of a lesson and a teacher's account do not match, you can watch the lesson instead of choosing who to believe. Most of the time it defuses the complaint; occasionally it confirms it, and then you act on fact rather than impression.
**Checking that your standard is your standard.** Every academy sells a standard of teaching. At fifteen teachers you can no longer verify it by sitting in. Sampling a lesson a week keeps the claim honest.
Deleting a recording actually deletes it
An admin can delete any recording. Deleting removes it from the list and revokes playback immediately, and the stored video is then permanently erased after a seven-day window — the window exists so an accidental delete is recoverable, not so the footage lingers.
This matters more than a delete button usually does. Anything less than real erasure means that a parent asking you to delete their child's footage gets an answer you cannot actually keep. It also means every lesson you ever recorded stays in storage forever, growing into a liability with no upside. Delete, here, means gone.
It costs storage, and you should plan for it
Video is large even at 480p. Capture targets roughly 1 Mbps of video plus 128 kbps of audio, which works out to somewhere near half a gigabyte for a full hour. Recordings count against your plan's storage allowance like any other file your academy stores.
The practical consequence: recording every lesson from every teacher forever is the wrong default even where it is allowed, and not because of policy. Decide what you keep and for how long, and delete what has served its purpose. A recording you watched, acted on and deleted has done its whole job.
How to switch it on
1. Open **Teachers**, choose the teacher, and turn on **Automatic Lesson Recording**. 2. Tell that teacher before their next lesson. Discovering it from the notice mid-class is a bad way to find out, and it is the fastest way to lose a good teacher's trust. 3. Add a line to your enrolment terms covering recording, who can view it, and your retention period. 4. Find finished recordings under **Recordings** in your dashboard, where you can play them back and delete them. 5. Review deliberately — a lesson a week, chosen in advance — rather than only reaching for it when something has already gone wrong.
Recording is not the feature that makes an academy work. Attendance, scheduling and the teachers themselves do that. But when you need to know what actually happened in a room you were not in, nothing else substitutes for it — and it only works if it was already running.
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