LESSONS FROM THE WEB

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The Virtual Teacher

Patrick Wiseman, Georgia State College of Law

For several years, I have used a variety of collaborative Internet tools in conjunction with my classes, from the "lowest common denominator," the email discussion list, to sophisticated, interactive websites. In this brief essay, I describe some of my experiences with some collaborative tools, suggesting some pedagogical pros and cons. Where possible, I have provided links to examples of the tools. Those with the technical wherewithal (or support!) to experiment themselves may wish to visit Teaching (Virtually) Teaching, a site where I provide more examples of and links to a number of virtual teaching tools.

My principal interest in the use of these tools is to enable collaborative work through the Internet. While this is useful in general, it's especially useful at a school like Georgia State University where many students pursue their degree while earning a living or raising a family. Use of these tools allows students to live their off-campus life, while not being deprived of an "on-campus" experience, albeit a virtual one.

My focus here will be on the use of three tools, a simple tool for providing feedback to students on their performance, an interactive website used for anonymous, continual course evaluation by students (together, these tools allow for continual, mutual evaluation), and online editable pages, which enable class participants to work on a single text.

Use of these and other tools, I have concluded, does not simply enable me to do old things in a new way. It also enables me to do things which I was not able to do, or not able to do easily, before.

Perhaps the most exciting innovation is the "continual evaluation." I provide a webpage to which students may anonymously post evaluations of the course. (I initiated this in my course on Law and the Internet, but will make it available in all of my courses this Fall and henceforward.) Students fill out a simple online form, which asks "What's Working?", "What's Not Working?", and invites general comments. The evaluation is posted to the webpage and is simultaneously emailed to me. I make it a point to forward the evaluation to the class discussion list, together with my response, which, more often than not, is to change my behavior in some way. Students who evaluate the course, and who see that their evaluation makes a difference, feel a greater sense of control and ownership of the course than is usually the case. I don't wish to overstate the impact of this practice, but I think it has the potential significantly to change the dynamic of the teacher-student relationship.

In my course on Law and the Internet, where a substantial part of the final grade is based on class participation on the email list, on various websites, and in the online classroom, I have also provided my students with an ongoing evaluation of their work. They may retrieve my current evaluation by email at any time, by filling out an online form. This, it turns out, is an enormous amount of work for me (although it's work I would have to do eventually anyway) but very useful to students and to the class generally. After the first evaluation, students who were not doing very well improved the quality of their work, and students who were doing well were appreciative of the positive feedback.

I had been a little apprehensive of using either of these evaluation tools. I had feared that students, when evaluating the course, might tell me things I was unable to do anything about, at least in short order. And, of course, they might tell me things I didn't want to hear. As I begin to use the continual evaluation in my "offline" courses, it remains to be seen whether this apprehension is justified. I had also worried that evaluating students' work in progress would have a chilling effect on their creativity. So far, in my experience, neither concern was justified. My quick responses to their evaluative comments were appreciated, and, if there was nothing I could do to fix something, I simply said so, and students were understanding. My experience with evaluating student work in progress is limited to just one semester (Spring 1998) but there was certainly no lack of creativity in that class. Once again, this "mutual evaluation" had, I believe, a significant impact on the teacher-student relationship, converting it into a much more collaborative relationship than is perhaps typically the case. (Of course, I speak from the professorial perspective; students might not have perceived it quite the same way.)

I have used online editable pages for a number of purposes. The most useful was perhaps the interactive class schedule in the course on Law and the Internet. Students, individually or in groups, were required to create a website for their discussion topic, and then to link to that website from the class schedule. Thus, the schedule was maintained by the students as the semester progressed. This is something which one simply could not do on paper. The evolving schedule was there for all to see as it evolved. (There's an example of the editable page at the Teaching (Virtually) Teaching site.)

Less successfully, I experimented with an editable page to have students discuss what rules or norms govern behavior on the Internet. It struck me, once I had provided an editable schedule, that I was trusting my student editors to follow certain protocols, which I did not explicitly articulate. The page, it seemed to me, was a sort of microcosm of the Internet itself. And so I created an editable page (called "Rulez? What Rulez?") on which I invited students to discuss the question, "What rules, if any, govern conduct here?" The first time I created the page, I asked that people not use Netscape's "blink" tag (which causes text to blink and which, in my opinion, has absolutely no legitimate use). The first student to participate basically said, "I'll blink if I want to," and did. I made a crucial mistake here (although it proved to be an interesting mistake). I made use of the blink tag technologically impossible within my editable pages. (I thought I had made blinking technologically impossible but a student in my Summer 1998 course proved me wrong, thus making another interesting point!)

My technological response to what I deemed "bad behavior" was a mistake because it re-enforced the students' perspective that "the professor's in charge," and they'd better toe the line. It was also, of course, illustrative of one way in which behavior deemed undesirable by the powers that be might be suppressed. At least with that first class, the discussion was chilled for a while.

The experience taught me something about the use of collaborative tools. In order for them to work successfully, I had to become a collaborator, and be willing to relinquish "control."

If you use these technologies, you will lose some of the control you thought you had over the class. (I've long observed that a teacher's control over the classroom is a very fragile thing anyway.) Students will provide much more of the course content than is typically the case, and will participate in ways you may not have anticipated.

Students, for the most part, seem engaged by the use of tools like these. And I have certainly found myself thinking a lot more about what I'm doing. I have been known to say that I use Internet technologies in teaching because they're there, but that's obviously not a sufficient rationale. These tools provide a way for students to do much of their learning by discovery, and by collaborative effort. My role has changed in that I am now not so much a repository of information as I am a manager of the learning process. The first thing I say to my students in Law and the Internet is, "I'm not going to teach you much, but you're going to learn a lot." Perhaps that's the sense in which my use of this technology makes me a virtual teacher.

Where you have the last word...

• I enjoyed [the author's] honesty in stating that a student was enable the blink to come online. I also think he must spend a lot of time on the computer if he responds to each student. Thought the involvement of student will be great for them.

  [name withheld by request]

• My point of view about this tool in the new way of teaching, are the same way as you think. Actually the lawyers has to change is way of learning law. For example here in Mexico and some cities like Zacatecas, the lawyers are in other times, they say they don't need the computers and the new technologies. I'm a law student, and I believe the importance of new kinds of teaching ways.

  Raul Carrillo de Muro
  Universidad de Zacatecas
  Zachatecas, MEXICO

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

Previous columns in this series:

• Build It, and They Will Come: Using a Web Page as an Effective Extension of Your Classroom and Faculty Office
  Pedro Malavet, University of Florida School of Law
• The Rewards and Risks of Authoring a Web Site
  Barbara Glesner-Fines, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
• Teaching With the Web
  Jerry Kang, UCLA School of Law
• Re-thinking Electronic Casebooks
  Gary Neustadter, Santa Clara University School of Law
• Planning a Law School Web Site
  Mark Gould, Faculty of Law, University of Bristol, UK
• Takeovers that Overtake the Traditional Classroom: Web-based Simulations as a Law School Learning Environment
  Robert Lawless, University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law
• Copyright, Academia and the New Scholarship
  Kim Dayton, University of Kansas School of Law
• The Four Corners of the Academic Website World
  William Slomanson, Thomas Jefferson School of Law