I saw a poll on LI the other week

Should “Cameras On” 📸 be mandatory for all training sessions?

The correct answer is, of course, no. However, of the almost 600 people who replied, a majority of 56 to 44 said yes.

Here’s what the “cameras on” brigade miss:

This isn’t about engagement. It’s about control masquerading as pedagogy.

The assumption lurking behind mandatory cameras is that learning requires surveillance. That without visual proof of attention, nothing happens. That the instructor’s need to see faces trumps every other consideration.

But look at what this actually reveals about our training model. If your session only works when you can monitor facial expressions, you’ve designed performance theatre, not learning. You’re optimising for the appearance of engagement rather than the conditions that produce capability change.

Consider what mandatory cameras exclude: the parent managing childcare interruptions, the neurodiverse colleague for whom constant video presence creates cognitive overload, the person in a shared workspace without privacy, and anyone dealing with bandwidth constraints that make video a technical barrier rather than a learning one.

And here’s the question nobody in that 56% wants to answer: what evidence suggests that cameras-on correlates with learning outcomes? Where’s the data showing that visible faces predict behaviour change back in the workflow?

This is measurement theatre. We’re measuring what’s easy to see, not what matters.

Real engagement happens in the work after the session ends, not in the Brady Bunch grid during it.