Expanding Education Researchers’ Access to Classroom Observation Data With a Remote and Cost-Effective Video Data Collection Protocol

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated long-term shifts to virtual instruction among most US schools presented notable challenges among education researchers. Ongoing projects conducted in school settings experienced sudden losses of access to teacher and student participants, in many cases leading to severe interruptions to data collection efforts. Perhaps most notably, upon returns to in-person instruction in the 2021/22 academic year most schools instigated strict policies limiting the number of non-school personnel who could enter school buildings, including researchers conducting in-person data collections. As such, many researchers had to find alternative means to gather data. In this paper, we offer a new protocol that we created in response to these challenges that allows for the secure and fully remote collection of video data in school settings. This new protocol not only addressed the immediate needs of the focal study but also addresses some of the most notable barriers to collecting classroom video data in the field of education research at large. In this paper, we describe the initial development and application of this protocol among a local study of elementary teachers, as well as the scaling of this protocol in a study of elementary teachers in multiple states. It is our hope that this protocol can expand education researchers’, practitioners’, and policymakers’ access to classroom video data.