LESSONS FROM THE WEB

Lessons | Talkback | Archive
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In this monthly column, law professors comment on the many academic opportunities and challenges presented by Web technology.

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Choosing Appropriate Web Courseware For Your Law School Class
Susanna Fischer, Columbus School of Law
Catholic University

If you’re reading this column, it’s virtually certain that you have some degree of interest in using World Wide Web technology in law school teaching. Maybe you’ve already created Web pages for your course, or maybe you’re just starting to think about it. Perhaps you are interested in advising faculty at your law school on using the Web in their teaching. But whatever your goal, you need to choose the appropriate tools to create and manage course Web pages. I call these tools “Web courseware”.

This article attempts to provide some guidance on choosing Web courseware so that you will not have to resort entirely to the method I used: trial and error. I embarked on my law teaching career only a year and a half ago. Believing that, as a novice teacher, I had little to lose but my dignity, I immediately started to try out Web courseware in my teaching. I have used a wide variety of Web courseware in the courses I teach: Copyright, Cyberlaw, and Civil Procedure. Using Web courseware has enabled me to launch some exciting teaching projects in my courses.

One such project is the “Joint Privacy Project”, an international collaboration in the fall 2000 semester between my Cyberlaw class at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and Professor Patrick Quirk’s Law of Electronic Commerce class at Bond University in Queensland, Australia. We assigned our students to virtual “law firms”. Each “firm” was comprised of students studying in American and Australia, who were not only Americans and Australians, but also students from a wide range of other countries, including India, Pakistan, Norway, and South Africa. The members of each “firm” used e-mail, threaded discussion fora, class Web pages, and Internet research to collaborate on a written memorandum advising mock clients on a problem.

All of the Joint Privacy Project problems concerned privacy issues relating to personal data on the Internet under American, Australian, and European law. Students used the Internet to research applicable law, including the European Union Data Protection Directive, the Safe Harbor Decision of the European Commission authorizing data transfers from Europe to U.S. companies that voluntarily agree to provide adequate privacy protection for such data, the Australian Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Bill 2000, and the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 and its implementing regulations.

Since the theme of the Joint Privacy Project was privacy in personal information, I used password protected project Web pages to post information about the project generally, as well as information on each student participant. This information included statements of each student’s views on the extent to which the law should protect personal information on the Internet both before and after completing the Joint Privacy Project. I also posted digital photographs of the students to help the Australian students to get to know them.

To get to know each other further, at the end of the semester, we held a Internet videoconference between the United States and Australia. For this conference, we used Microsoft NetMeeting, to discuss the Joint Privacy Project. The videoconference was a resounding success. The students greatly enjoyed the opportunity to virtually “meet” their foreign counterparts and discuss the project with them in real time.

I believe that the Joint Privacy Project resulted in many benefits for my students. One was the opportunity for these students to gain international perspective on a global legal problem. Another was the opportunity to develop skills necessary for legal practice in a global business environment. These skills range from the ability to negotiate time zones to communicating with lawyers whose native language is not English. The Joint Privacy Project also helped to prepare students for working in a technically sophisticated world, where technologies such as the World Wide Web, videoconferencing, and e-mail are becoming increasingly commonplace. These pedagogical benefits could not have been achieved without appropriate Web courseware, since without such courseware I would not have been able to manage the Joint Privacy Project from the American side.

So how did I select appropriate Web courseware for this project? Below, I set out the major factors influencing my decision to select Lexis Virtual Classroom (“Lexis”) below. However, before I do so, I would like to emphasize that my selection of this particular courseware for this particular project does not mean that I endorse one single Web courseware system as best for all law teachers or even for every course I teach! The merits of Web courseware very much depend on the teacher’s goals and priorities for a particular course.

Here are the main issues that I took into account in selecting Web courseware for the Joint Privacy Project:

  • Web Page Appearance: I wanted my home page and course pages to include something more than plain text, but I was happy to use a template permitting me only a limited number of options for page design and appearance. I also wanted my page to be simple to create and to modify. I was not willing to take the time to master the Web’s lingua franca, HTML, or its younger sister, XHTML, so that I could code my web pages myself. Lexis uses templates for its course pages, which can be modified to a limited extent. It is very simple to create and modify course Web pages.

  • Speed/Server: The majority of my students still access the Web via slow dial-up connections, so I was very concerned about whether my course pages could be downloaded quickly. Although my university permits me to post course pages on my university’s server, I did not have strong feelings about whether my course pages should be hosted by the courseware provider’s server (as opposed to my university’s server or some other ISP’s server), so long as that server was reliable. The courseware provider I chose, Lexis, hosted my project pages on its server. I had no problems with the server’s speed or reliability.

  • Licenses: I did not want to pay for Web courseware. This limited my choices to courseware that, like Lexis, is offered for free to law professors and courseware for which my university has a site license. I preferred not to enter into a license agreement if I could avoid doing so. Lexis permitted me to use Virtual Classroom for free and did not require me to enter into a license.

  • Access: This was a major issue for me. Because the Joint Privacy Project required my students to focus on legal protection of personal data, most felt strongly that the project web site should be password protected. I also wanted to create separate threaded discussion fora for each virtual “firm” that would be password protected to limit entry only to each virtual “firm’s” members and the professors. Lexis allowed all this.

  • Functionality: The specific features I required the Joint Privacy Project Web courseware to have were the following. I wanted an online calendar for posting project deadlines. I also wanted to create links on the project home page to Professor Quirk’s and my course Web pages, so that students could easily link to information about the Australian students as well as to supplementary research materials. Moreover, I wanted to build several threaded discussion fora. I also wanted to post an online syllabus describing the project and its rules. Lexis provided all these features. It should be noted that there were some features of Lexis that I did not need for this project, such as interactive quizzes, a gradebook, and the ability to link directly into Lexis proprietary databases.

  • Learning Curve: It was important to me that the Web courseware did not require much time or effort to master, both for me and for my students. We all found Lexis satisfactorily easy to use.

An analysis of the above factors resulted in my decision to use Lexis. However, I have used different courseware, including the West Education Network and Microsoft FrontPage for other courses and projects, for which I have different goals and priorities. For more information on choosing Web courseware, I recommend Jurist’s “Lessons From the Web” inaugural column by William Jefferson Sloman dated February 1998 and entitled “The Four Corners of the Academic Website World,” as well as Future U’s comparative analysis of some leading Web courseware.

© 2001 by Susanna Fischer. All rights reserved.
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 The views expressed in this column are solely those of its author, and do not reflect those of JURIST, its Advisory Board, its staff or its host institutions.
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