Journal of Law, Information and Science
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PETER JONES[*] AND RICK SNELL[**]
This article outlines the use of computer assisted learning within the Law School of the University of Tasmania. The authors detail the steps that have been taken so far and the possible outcomes of the project.
A computer assisted learning (CAL) project was undertaken by the Law School of the University of Tasmania in order to tackle several emerging problems. The project broadly aimed to provide students with an alternative means of learning which supplemented the existing educational processes. With the Australian government push for productivity gains within educational institutions our Law School faced the problems posed by burgeoning class sizes while simultaneously maintaining quality teaching practices. The CAL project attempted to provide a form of tutorial relief by providing the educator with innovative alternatives to reduce the strain placed upon limited primary teaching materials. Additionally, several of the CAL modules that have been developed to date address the particular needs of overseas full fee paying students. The CAL initiative has provided access to information not easily available elsewhere and has also resulted in improved utilisation of the computer lab.
Our Law computer lab was initially established in 1987 with 14 Apple Mac Plus computers. At that time it was envisaged that its primary role would be the word processing of assignments by students. The pattern of usage of the computers has changed significantly in recent years and the need to replace the ageing equipment became apparent. While word processing remains an important aspect, the lab is now used extensively for computer-based legal research. Students now use InterNet extensively for subscribing to email discussion lists, accessing services such as gopher, FTP and electronic news groups and to perform searches of the American Lexis database. The use of our CAL modules that have been developed in-house has emerged as a significant reason for modernising the existing lab with new multimedia capable computers.
The CAL initiative undertaken by the authors combined the experiences of a legal academic with the technical knowledge of a computer programmer. This mixture of skills and experience provided an exciting synthesis occasionally offset by discordant ideas about how projects should be developed. At all stages our aim was to produce CAL materials that were flexible and could be easily used and further developed by academics with little computer expertise. Given our limited funding and relatively low-tech operating environment we concentrated on developing a CAL project that lacked the ‘bells and whistles’ of many alternative developments but could be used by academics working in a normal law school environment.
The outcome of the project has been a low cost and easy to use CAL authoring system. The system is flexible enough to accommodate a range of different learning and teaching methods. It has provided an entry point for the ordinary legal academic to experiment with CAL in any course without the expenditure of large amounts of time or the requirement of expensive software.
The aim of this article has been to describe the method, reasoning and trials faced in developing a CAL project in a small law school and to encourage other small law schools to develop their own projects or to build upon our CAL developments.
Our Law School has 25 teaching staff, 5 support staff and approximately 600 full time students. From the commencement of the CAL project there was no spare capacity or resources to devote to our project. Therefore we had to aim for small scale projects that could be developed part time (usually after hours or on weekends) and utilised basic technology. In the early 1990s basic technology for us was the basic platform of a Apple Mac Plus with no hope for colour and if proposed software cost $1 it was almost beyond our budget. It could be described generously as a shoestring operation.
The other major determinant in the formation of the CAL project was the level of computer expertise (apart from one of the authors) within the law school. This expertise ranged from computer illiterate to expert word processing. Therefore any CAL project had to be easy to use and of demonstrable practical use to other staff.
Our first project, an electronic book (details below), was almost our last and taught us several important lessons. The two most important lessons were that shoestring operations should aim for smaller goals and funding support is crucial. The project received hardware support from Apple Australia through the Apple University Development Fund (AUDF) which has proven essential to the success of the project. The AUDF grant was then crucial in winning a University of Tasmania Innovative Teaching Grant of $6,000. It was the teaching grant which enabled us to hire a student assistant and thus produce a large number of modules in a relatively short period of time. Without these two associated developments (the AUDF grant and the teaching grant) we would still be tinkering away with little to show for our efforts.
All CAL modules have been developed to run on the Law School’s Mac computers using the popular HyperCard product. HyperCard programs are known as “stacks” and are based loosely upon the structure of a Rolodex card system. Each stack is comprised of one or more “cards” upon which only three sorts of objects may reside: fields of text, push buttons and art work. This simple structure is complemented by a fully featured though easy to use programming language.
HyperCard provides a programming environment that permits even a novice programmer to exploit the visual interface of the Macintosh computer by integrating text, pictures and actions. However, it has traditionally had poor support for colour, there is no true hypertext although it can be simulated with additional programming, it is slow, is not available on other platforms such as IBMs, lacks many paragraph text formatting options and presents many obstacles to structured software engineering development. The Macintosh unfortunately lacks many of the hypertext and CAL authoring tools available to DOS and Windows users. Until the takeover of HyperCard by Claris in the early 1990s its major advantage was that it was free. Even today, a HyperCard player is shipped free with every Mac.
HyperCard has proven quite effective for simple CAL projects within our Law School. The ability to easily place text and graphics while incorporating a full programming language makes HyperCard ideal for projects that are not overly complex. HyperCard has proved well suited for electronic books and interactive flow charts. However, as complexity is added the limitations and quirks of this programming environment become apparent. It remains a tribute to HyperCard that the Law School was able to employ two students, who had previously used a computer only for word processing, to develop over a period of several weeks a series of a half-dozen legal educational modules in the areas of property and administrative law.
The first project undertaken was for the topic Co-Ownership in Property Law. By using hypertext links this module combined the full text of cases and legislation with annotated summaries and explanatory materials. Students could, for instance, click on the name of a case and jump to its full text, export any text to disk in Microsoft Word format, print to paper, or cut and paste information for inclusion into a word processing document. The students were therefore presented with a type of “electronic book” that allowed them to rove over the topic as they felt like it.
This initial trial project suffered from several problems including limitations imposed by the computing equipment. The tiny black and white screens of the Mac Plus model greatly hindered the presentation of an electronic book reducing the amount of text that could be displayed, making the choice of fonts important. The nature of the hardware prevented the use of full motion video and constrained the use of digitised speech. Audio and video recordings of a lecturer can be reproduced on a computer with surprisingly little effort. These can make the final product more engaging for the student and brings the presentation to life.
1. Sample screen from Co-Ownership electronic book
Another major drawback for us was that the "electronic book" idea was not easily translated into other topics such as Easements or other subjects such as Administrative Law. We were presented with the prospect of committing almost as many resources into the development of new "electronic books" as it took to design the first model.
As a result of the experience and feedback gained from this first module a decision was made to incorporate greater interaction by focusing upon a generic question and answer generation program to provide the flexibility required by law teachers over a number of subject areas. Introducing greater interaction requires the students to think about the information that is presented to them.
The tool that was subsequently developed permitted the production of CAL programs incorporating question and answer templates along with an advanced hypertext system. These two important elements were based upon a common framework that is both modular and reusable. Novices or busy academics have learnt how to use the tool in a matter of hours and can then rapidly develop their own CAL modules. The project exploits an easy to use interface comprised of menus, dialogues and windows to create both questions and hypertext. This authoring tool has enabled educators to focus upon educational content rather than programming issues.
The structure of much of the developed modules has been based upon common, though customisable, templates. For example, the multiple choice question and answer elements include a question statement, a criterion for correct response, a hint and an explanation of the answer. Hypertext can be used throughout each question or any other text in the stack. Responses may be displayed to explain exactly why answers may be wrong as well as providing model correct solutions when a question is successfully answered. Questions may be customised to include sounds, pictures or even QuickTime movies if hardware permits.
2. Hypertext and Question development menus
A log is automatically maintained of student responses and the time spent by each student in each module. In this way the pattern of usage of CAL programs within the lab has been monitored. A questionnaire card is appended to the end of every CAL module which seeks feedback from the student to assess their views on the relevance of the presented information, implementation issues and their views on CAL.
3. Student questionnaire presented at completion of every stack.
The hypertext system which has been developed allows for pop-up definitions, links to related information, automatic hypertext indexing of words and phrases, the playing of sounds or recorded speech and for even greater flexibility the ability to execute any desired segment of programming code. Hypertext allows for the presentation of information to students at different levels of detail. By clicking on the name of a case the student may view a short summary and explanation of a case or even its full text. Important points are cross referenced through hypertext links to commentary material while pop-up definitions are available for many legal terms. Students may backtrack to a previously read section or browse hypertext links to related concepts and information.
The question and answer system implemented in the current series of legal modules supports only answers that are multiple choice or which require the entry of specific key word or phrase. Short essay style questions were considered for their self assessment value with a student being provided with a sample solution on completion of the exercise. Students could save their short essay answers to disk for later reference or they may be asked to grade their own answer by answering multiple choice questions about whether important aspects were discussed in their answer.
The information content of the stack represents a considerable investment in time and effort. Steps have been taken to isolate the HyperCard front end from the educational content. Work has been done to allow questions to be created using a text editor. This may then be compiled to generate a new question in the HyperCard front end. Similarly the text of cases, statutes and explanatory material can be easily imported and exported to Microsoft Word RTF documents.
The user interface of a CAL program should be uncluttered and not detract from its educational content. Indeed, an effective user interface should be largely transparent to the user and not overpower the information. HyperCard has a habit of tempting the programmer into the overuse of numerous icons and buttons. However HyperCard offers the flexibility to incorporate new ideas or design features relatively quickly. In 1993 one of the authors attended a conference in New Zealand where there was a major display of CAL software developed on HyperCard. Within two days of returning from the conference we were able to incorporate many new features inspired by the demonstrations in New Zealand.
Set out below are the types of modules which the CAL project produced. While the quality and success of each module varied an important aspect to us was the relative ease to develop each module. At all times the work was undertaken by the authors outside normal working hours or with the help of a research assistant.
• Co-ownership Electronic Book
• Customised Questions and Answer Stack
• Property Law Tutorials
• Easements Overview
• Co-ownership Overview
• Restrictive Covenants- Overview and Problem Solver
• The Court System in Tasmania
• The System of Government in Tasmania
• Judges of the High Court of Australia
• Introduction to Administrative Law
• Administrative Law Questions and Answers
• Freedom Of Information Act
• Introduction to the Law School
• Using and Finding Legal Research Materials
• Government and Court System Questions and Answers
• Personal Solvency Tutorials
These stacks were developed to explore the plausibility of using question and answer format as a replacement of, or supplement to tutorials given, at least in the material presented early in the year, which consists mainly of concepts and definitions, rather than complex factual scenarios requiring detailed answers.
The stacks were designed mainly as a supplement to tutorials, but could easily be used as replacements for the tutorials at the beginning of the year. A small change to the programs used to create the question and answer formats would enable lecturers to keep track of student's scores (tabulated automatically by the program), and thus monitor progress. It was considered that these type of tutorial supplements would be advantageous for use by Overseas Students, or for students who were having difficulties with their law subjects.
The computer tutorials consist purely of questions and answers, on topics such as basic concepts in property law, and adverse possession. The 'concepts' tutorials consist of questions regarding definitions, such as "land", and "fee-simple." The tutorials on adverse possession are constituted by small factual scenarios, where students can apply the law, and indicate their answers.
The stack took about 50 hours to develop. The development (input of information) of these stacks was quick and simple. The way in which the program is written dictates the format which the question and answers take. The developer simply types in a question in the appropriate box, types in a mixture of correct and incorrect answers in the boxes provided, and then turns to another card, enabling the programming of the correct answers, responses and further explanations to the answers, and any hints which may help students obtain the correct answers.
4. The first question from Property & Adverse Possession showing pop-up definitions
This stack was developed with the problems and criticisms of the Co-ownership Electronic Book project in mind. The stack was created to provide students with an overview of the law on the most complex and detailed area of property law. The restrictive covenants topic is the largest of the topics in Semester 2, and though not conceptually difficult, the sheer bulk and often lack of logical organisation of the material, imbues students with a fear of the area.
The basic aim was to simplify, and decrease the information, and present it to students in a logical, easily understood manner.
The information utilised was that of a past high distinction student, whose material was drawn from lecture notes, supplementary notes prepared by the lecturer, and books. The stack provides the user with varying depths of information, the bare basics, and has the added option for the student of looking further into the law on the area. The information stored in the program should be sufficient to enter into and complete an exam on the area.
The stack took approximately 5 days (40 hours) to develop, being extremely complex.
Information was initially developed in flow chart form, and then, a system was developed to provide further information and details. The information stored in the overview in reality consists only of a logical progression of headings and sub-headings in a topic. Linked to the flow chart topics and elements is the law, or explanatory information on the topic - the basics needed for an understanding on the area. This information is linked to the flow chart by making the screens active, enabling a student to click on an area of the flow chart, and be taken to a card containing the relevant law.
5. Interactive flow chart screen for restrictive covenants. Clicking on each box leads to further information.
The problem solver was designed as a representation of the thought processes involved in answering a problem question on the area. The problem solver enables a student to have an exam question in front of them, and follow a step by step process of answering a series of questions, eventually taking them to a logical conclusion, as to whether a valid and enforceable restrictive covenant existed. The problem solver is best used in conjunction with the overview, so a paper handout of the flow chart is provided to the student.
A critical aspect of this module was the key role played by the student. What we wanted to achieve was a process that facilitated student learning rather than a structured design that forced students to follow a lecturer's thought processes. The concept of a flow chart was the student's successful attempt to navigate this area of the law. The student designer also brought a much more visual orientation to the design process. The authors up to this point in time had been locked into the mindset of a text orientated approach to CAL development in the area of legal studies.
These two stacks were based on the idea behind the restrictive covenants overview. The stacks differ because detailed information is not provided, only the flow chart. The stacks were not detailed to the extent of the restrictive covenants because we wanted feedback on the use and value of the information in the covenants stack before time was spent creating the same volume of information.
The overviews provide a means of conveying information which lecturers often fail to provide to students - that is, a general picture or outlook on the way in which the various aspects of that section of law relate. This was of particular importance with easements, as the relationship between Common Law easements and those on Torrens Title land cannot be easily depicted with words.
The Co-ownership stack is in flow chart form , providing students with a step-by step guide to determining the form of co-ownership in existence. Once again, only a small overview, but sufficient to provide the student with a better understanding of how the law works.
Development was simple, taking a half day for each, being far less detailed than the covenants flow charts alone.
The next HyperCard project was to develop a series of administrative law overviews, and a corresponding series of questions and answers, which could be used to monitor the student's intake of information. Administrative Law at the Commonwealth level lends itself to this type of presentation because of its structured statutory base.
The stacks took about 120 hours to develop, this included time taken to instruct and produce a new HyperCard creator. Modules were created in the areas of natural justice, ultra vires, jurisdictional error and the Commonwealth statutory review system. So the average time was 30 hours per module. Originally, the information was produced in standard block flow-chart form only. We then set about the task of adding some form of design and presentation to the information to make the program more interesting, yet maintaining ease of understanding.
The lecturer in this subject developed a series of questions and answers based on his existing Personal and Corporate Solvency Course. This was the first time that the system was used without the direct involvement of either of the authors. Our student assistant worked with the lecturer to produce a series of electronic tutorials. Prior to this the course had only been taught by lectures.
The questions consisted of three varieties, and were presented in different ways. The first tested the students basic knowledge of the area, such as definitions and basic concepts in the Question and Answer format. The second set of questions was closely linked with the first, involving a series of small problem scenarios which provided a choice of answers, enabling the student to pick a desirable or supportable outcome to the problem; also in the Question and Answer format. The third set was based on previous exam questions, and a new format for the presentation of that information was developed, because the Question and Answer format was inappropriate. Each of the problem or essay questions is displayed on the screen, and the students instructed to read the problem, identify the issues, and then press a button on the screen which is linked to another card which reveals the issues determined to be important by the lecturer.
From a student's point of view, the latter part of the program is one of the most beneficial developments in HyperCard yet. In subjects without tutorials, students are often at a loss in identifying the issues which are importance in the eyes of the lecturers, and this provides a quick and easy means of obtaining such information.
This set of questions took 12 hours to develop not taking into account the lecturer's time to develop the actual questions. Such information can be entered into the computer in a very short period of time (five questions could be created in under an hour).
We hold great reservations where staff are keen to use CAL to completely replace contact teaching hours. In our Law School, CAL has been used to cover basic or routine aspects of an area or to provide students with many opportunities to explore areas of a course which students in the past have found confusing or difficult. Contact hours remain the same but are devoted to other aspects of the learning process. Another use for the CAL modules has been to provide electronic tutorials for subjects that have not offered tutorials previously. In our view there must be a net benefit to the students in CAL projects rather than a program focused towards cost saving gains for the institution.
Visual presentation is important but in-house CAL projects should have higher priorities. Our experiences with other CAL projects is that a lot of effort can go into presentation that may not necessarily translate into something that is available to current students of an institution.
The initial effort to output ratio is very high. Some estimates place a figure in the order of 100 person hours required for each hour of computerised education. Our CAL system operates at a ratio of about 20 hours per hour of CAL material. In small and medium sized law schools care must be taken to design something that is useable over a two to three year period. In small sized Law Schools a 100 hours of development time for a one-off use is just not feasible or justifiable. The lesson we learnt from the electronic book saga is that CAL modules need to be able to be easily and quickly modified. We subsequently incorporated a degree of flexibility in the question development section to permit easier modification of existing questions. This flexibility is necessary especially in the more dynamic areas of law.
At every step in the process designers and developers should critically question whether a CAL module is the most suitable or desirable measure. Books can often provide quicker access to information which is easier to browse. We discovered in our development of the Covenants flow chart that most students while they found the module helpful actually felt that a handout depicting the diagram we had developed was even more useful.
We have some suggestions for academic staff interested in CAL based on our experiences since 1991. The key lesson is the early and equal participation of the end users, students, into the development process. Our first experiment, the Co-ownership Electronic Book was completely developer driven. We had the ideas, the vision and slowly over many months we laboured away to produce what we thought was an A-one product. It took a while to absorb the less than fulsome response from the first student guinea pigs. Our initial response was "we need colour, better machines, more fine tuning" but then we started to listen and learn. From that point on we have included students into the design and development process from the beginning. Most of the significant features and ideas have come from student input rather than from the inflexible minds of the authors. Some other points we have found to be important include:
• teaching relief for academics undertaking the development of CAL programs,
• must be able to devote regular amounts of time to the project,
• fine distinction and qualifications of meaning can be difficult to convey with CAL,
• any CAL module must be closely integrated with the course content and teaching methodology.
Despite its output and the feedback received from students using the modules the project remains a part time shoestring operation. Our project has been pushed to one side, away from funding sources, while funding and resources have been poured into another new project that is designed to produce commercially marketable CAL material. Given the imperatives of the higher education reforms that have taken place in Australia this pitch for a marketable product is understandable.
We believe that we achieved our original idea for a CAL project. We have produced an easy to use in-house system that has the potential to inspire and encourage our own colleagues and students to build on our shaky beginnings in CAL development. More importantly we hope that we have produced modules and ideas that Law staff and students in other Law Schools will find useful.
[*] BSc (Hons), Computer Development Coordinator, School of Business and Law, University of Tasmania, Peter.Jones@BusLaw.utas.edu.au.
[**] BA (Hons)/LLB, Lecturer in Law, University of Tasmania, email R.Snell@Law.utas.edu.au.
The authors would like to express particularly thanks to Shaunnagh Dorsett, Yonna Petith, Gaye Doyle and Helen Townley for their ideas, efforts and time spent on this project. Special thanks must also go to the Apple University Development Fund (AUDF) and the University of Tasmania for the award of two grants after our first faltering efforts had borne some fruit and the promise of further achievements.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/JlLawInfoSci/1994/6.html