LESSONS FROM THE WEB

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

As with all JURIST columns, you're invited to Talkback. This month...
—————————————————————————————
Web Tutorials for Teaching Legal Research
Gretchen Van Dam
Adjunct Professor, Chicago-Kent College of Law
Circuit Librarian, U.S. Court of Appeals 7th Circuit

For the instructors of legal research at Chicago-Kent, moving classroom-based legal research training to an online environment was not so much a question of "why?" but "how?". The Why had become self-evident during the the last ten years of legal research instruction for our first year law students and the upper division students in advanced legal research classes. Chicago-Kent, with its deservedly renowned program in Legal Research & Writing, requires all law students to take both an introductory legal research and writing class during the first year (five credits) but also requires every student not participating in law review or moot court to take an advanced legal research class in a subject speciality (two credits). Attendant to these classes are research training sessions taught by the law librarians. The sheer logistics of providing research training for more than 400 1Ls and an average of eight advanced legal research sections each semester made the decision to move much of the instruction to self-paced online sessions an easy one. We were also seeing students arrive at law school with a wide range of computer skills and a growing disparity between the most skilled and the least skilled. Students with more advanced computer skills were frustrated with having to wait in a “hands-on” classroom training session (for Lexis, Westlaw, and the Internet) for less skilled students to catch up.

A Web Tutorial for Federal Legislative History

In 1996, it occurred to me that we could take advantage of the benefits of the easy-to-use hypertext capability of the new browsers to develop self-paced research training modules that would allow students at all computer skills levels to work at a pace convenient for them. It would also relieve some of the logistical burden placed on the law librarians to cover all the training for the 1Ls and the upper division classes. We decided at first to concentrate on developing research modules for the advanced legal research classes. The advanced legal research classes have four research sessions: legislative history; administrative research; empirical research; and international research. I focused on legislative history first as it is a research area that is easily broken down into components that lend themselves well to a web document. There was also the serendipity of having on hand a C-SPAN video that took the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act from soup to nuts – from introduction on the floor of the House to a Rose Garden signing ceremony with President Bush (the first one ;-) ). Adding audio and video to illustrate each step of the legislative process was too good an opportunity to pass up.

The tutorial is structured to take the student through the federal legislative process from the introduction of a bill to enactment. Along the way, the tutorial provides tips on locating the documents of the process (bills, committee reports, etc.). The tutorial demonstrates research resources across a variety of media – screen captures of print versions of bills, the Lexis and Westlaw databases, and active links to web sites.1 We decided to keep the Lexis and Westlaw demos at the level of screen captures to avoid the difficulties on entering passwords, etc. Where appropriate, an audio/video capture from C-SPAN was inserted. Some extra enhancements were added, such as tips on the proper Bluebook citations for legislative documents.

Onward

With one tutorial up and running (and the corresponding elimination of that classroom session for the upper division classes), we turned toward developing a tutorial for the Empirical research module. In the meantime, professors2 in the Legal Research & Writing program had developed multimedia “law library tours” for the web for the first year program. These online tours took advantage of the streaming video capabilities of the latest browser versions and “walked” the 1Ls through the law library, demonstrating legal research resources such as ALRs, Restatements, and legal encyclopedias. Prof. Lien and I discussed the possibility of combining the more text heavy format of the legislative history tutorial with the more video focused format of the tutorials designed for the first year students. We came up with the concept of structuring the Empirical Research tutorial as a series of video assignments from senior partners to associates, a video consultation with a reference librarian, and then into the virtual library to learn about and locate the research resources. The web design for this tutorial was developed by Fred Barnhart, currently the Interim Director of the law library. This tutorial combines streaming video, screen captures from print resources and Lexis and Westlaw databases, and active links to Internet sites. The third online tutorial, a text only tutorial in International Research, was developed this Fall.

Online Tutorials Ver. 2.0 (and 2.1 and Ver. 3.0)

The benefits of moving to the online environment for teaching research were many: expanded classroom time for the LRW professors to spend on writing and analysis; the elimination of the logistical burden of trying to schedule 400+ students in computer labs simultaneously; the benefit to the students of being able to work at their own pace and to go over the material as many times as they needed; the ability to run the tutorials from off-campus. Not the least of the benefits has been to inject some visual pizzaz into the teaching of legal research – the traditional method of bringing a cartload of books into the classroom and holding them up as you point out the index generated as much excitement as Ben Stein selling cold medication! Web tutorials can also be easily updated. As resources change, so can the tutorial.

The negatives of moving to the online environment are also there. The structure we’ve developed does not currently require any interaction from the student. They are not required to complete an online quiz following the completion of the tutorial, although they are assigned research exercises they must do and turn in that complement the tutorials (interactivity is a future goal). For the law librarians, the reduction is classroom interaction is a double-edged sword. The librarians enjoy working with the students on research training and while they do not miss trying to cover all the classroom sessions of past years, they do not want to totally eliminate all classroom interaction. Also, students have a tendency to downplay the importance of legal research training, particularly if it’s not delivered in the classroom. They can view the online tutorials as something extra and not necessary. Finally, web tutorials need to be constantly updated. As resources change, so must the tutorial.

We’ve found the experience, on the whole, to be positive for both students and instructors. Online tutorials have an organic quality to them. The ability to change over time, to respond quickly to new directions in legal research publishing and the phenomenal growth in legal research available over the Internet has made this structure one that works well for teaching legal research.

Footnotes

1 Permission was obtained from Lexis and Westlaw to use screen captures to demonstrate the appropriate databases.
2 Under the direction of Professor Molly Lien and coordinated by Professor Suzanne Ehrenberg.

© 2001 by Gretchen Van Dam. All rights reserved.
—————————————————————————————
 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.
 ———————————————————————
Talkback

Engaged? Enraged? JURIST would like to hear your reactions to this column and the issues it raises...

Your comments:

Your Name:
Organization:
E-Mail Address:
State/Country:

If you would like your comments to remain anonymous, check here: 

———————————————————————
Archive

Previous columns in this series: