Faculty Spotlight
August - September 2000: Dean Thomas Galligan
"In
the Spring I worked with Jennifer Gramling, a Graduate Assistant
from ITC. Jennifer and I had met regularly throughout the Fall
to discuss the project and she often came to my class to observe.
We made an initial decision regarding our activities in the Spring;
I would continue to use CourseInfo as a course supplement where
I would post assignments, announcements, and the syllabus. I give
out problems in my class and I put the problems on the Web site
too. We then decided to pick one or two units from the Torts Two
class and do an online guide or series of questions designed to
teach the students what the concepts were and they could use those
questions to both learn the concepts and review them.
"The format we chose was a multiple choice format where there were a bunch of questions and the student would click on A, B, C or D and the box would pop up correct because or incorrect with feedback. We did that with the very first unit of material that I covered in second semester Torts which is vicarious liability: When is one person responsible for another person's wrongful act?
"This worked great, and it was truly an online learning experience. However, the downside was it took a lot of time. I think both Jennifer and I realized that if we continued to do these module or units we wouldn't be able to cover the whole course. Would having two or three multiple choice / true false units in a semester long course be as beneficial for the students as something where we could get greater coverage? We were talking all the time and revising and reconsidering what we would do.
"We decided to use technology, that would be beneficial to the student in the Law school environment, and that would play to the strengths of the particular teacher. Now, I like to talk, so we thought we would try developing audio lectures and I'm going to come back and play with that word, lecture, in a second. We thought we would try using audio lectures and record the material, provide an outline of the material, and in the context of the the outline place links. The lecture we recorded was broken up into sound bites of maybe two minutes to five minutes and then a one or two page outline of the lecture. If the student clicked on a blue link within the outline, she or he could then listen to the teacher talk a little bit about that particular material. We also provided instructions on how to download the RealPlayer, a free online resource.
"These were also successful and I would say we have about half the class topics in these audio outlines. Next, we decided to record full lectures on each topic and to place these in their entirety on the Web. So, for half the topics, the student had two sources: the Web based outline with short links and the full lecture. For the other half of the class topics, the student didn't have the outline, but had the entire lecture instead.
