Journal of Law, Information and Science
|
|
Home
| Databases
| WorldLII
| Search
| Feedback
Journal of Law, Information and Science |
|
STEPHEN COLBRAN[*]
The information revolution is of crucial importance to the education of lawyers. Multimedia computer programs (legal courseware) and the information superhighway will impact significantly on law schools and the generations of lawyers destined to walk the hallowed electronic halls of our future law schools and solicitors offices. This article examines this revolution.
It is the thesis of this paper that the information superhighway with its unparalleled opportunity for gathering and disseminating information together with advances in legal courseware will redefine the concept of a law school and alter the current method of legal education and examination.
It may be hypothesised that in the year 2010 the traditional law school as we know it will be extinct and historians will trace the cause of extinction to the removal of the physical bonds between staff/students and spatial locations such as lecture theatres, seminar rooms, and the central hubs of the law library, administrative offices and residential colleges.
The modern law school may consist of academic and administrative staff together with a large body of students and practitioners telecommuting to a central computer. This computer which may serve several law schools will house a virtual law school containing interactive lectures, seminars, role play simulations, continuing legal education courseware, and a virtual library holding extensive collections of primary and secondary electronic publications (see figure 1, p 173).
Upon enrolment students will be given access to an electronic study guide for each unit outlining learning objectives and the tools available to complete assigned tasks. Students will regularly engage in bulletin board discussions and video conferences with other students and lecturers on selected topics (see figure 2, p 173).
Traditional teaching as telling models of legal education will decline in the face of the advantages of interactive multimedia. A technology which incorporates text, data bases, expert systems, sound, video, animation, photographs, simulations, virtual reality, the ability of computers to comprehend verbal instructions, and programs adjusting to student ability. All these technologies currently exist as does the ability to transmit this technology to and from any location on the information superhighway. It is the skilful use of these technologies that may lead to the extinction of the traditional law school as we now know it.
Soon there will be no necessity for lecture theatres, seminar rooms, expansive law libraries, academic and administrative staff offices, nor a student population resident at or near a University Campus or for printed study materials.
The argument for expenditure on physical facilities may prove difficult to justify on any economic basis. Lecture theatres used for the oral presentation of material, sometimes combined with audio visual assistance will no longer be necessary. Most Australian Law Schools do not adopt Socratic methods preferring teaching as telling methods. Socratic lectures should they be adopted could nevertheless be simulated by a combination of an expert system, a multimedia interface, and video conferencing. While there are opportunities for questions in traditional lectures the primary focus is the provision of information; in my experience very few students ask questions during lectures. With the greatest respect this system of teaching as telling is inefficient, open to error, places an overemphasis on verbal communication, and belongs to a bygone era.
The inefficiencies include:
1. Time wasted by students and staff in travelling to and attending lectures;
2. Where class sizes are large the necessity to repeat lectures;
3. The opportunity cost of funds spent on both building and maintaining lecture theatres; and
4. The economic costs associated with the spread of disease created by cramming large numbers of people together in one location.
Errors arise due to:
1. The poor quality of notes taken by students; and
2. The inefficiencies addressed above depleting the time that can be spent improving courses and further research.
Verbal communication while more efficient than the written word is by no means as effective as interactive self paced learning.
Interactive lectures can be of several forms:
1. Traditional lectures prerecorded and digitised;
2. Embedded with interactive examples;
3. Enabling full text retrieval of all reference material;
4. Having the ability to move about the lecture structure by user driven selections; and
5. Having the ability for easy updating.
There are no limits on the legal course materials that may be presented in this new medium, apart from the imagination of their creator.
Seminar rooms are generally used for small group discussion of legal problems. Many of the problems mentioned above are relevant to the provision of seminars or tutorials. Students frequently fail to prepare and fail to actively participate. Such problems can be eliminated through effective use of interactive seminars.
Interactive seminars can be created to encompass a broad range of materials from simple text to expensive multi-media programs. Actual direct communication can take place on bulletin boards and by electronic video conferencing. While it is true to say that education in this form may become impersonal economic necessity may drag law schools towards this technology.
Interactive moot courts (Virtual Court Rooms) can and have been created. Current embryonic versions of electronic moot courts enable students to engage in the adversarial process with strict guidance by an expert electronic judge. The simulations are extremely realistic and can test the ability of seasoned practitioners.
The law library will become a virtual library accessible from any location. At present cases and legislation are available electronically, but eventually so will all currently printed works - books, seminar papers etc.
There are a number of implications for law libraries:
1. It will not be necessary to build large buildings, to house, store and maintain materials which will become available in electronic form;
2. The costs associated with not being able to locate a book will no longer exist as they will be on line to however many users are interested;
3. There will be no reshelving costs etc. though there will be immense intellectual property issues to be resolved;
4. There will be increased expenditure on electronic services and infrastructure;
5. The costs of filing looseleaf updates will be saved when looseleafs are converted into electronic form;
6. Staff profiles of libraries will shift to a higher level research and advisory role;
7. It will not make sense to have a number of libraries duplicating the same resources. What may emerge is a central library offering electronic resources to all University Law Libraries, Law firms, and students via direct data access links; and
8. There may be the development of full featured electronic books with interactive and multimedia capabilities.
You may say that people hate reading computer screens for too long and you would be right. The solution, apart from improvements in screen technology which will happen, is that in the interim we should print retrieved text for analysis. There is no reason at present why we should not start to create a national electronic library system. Publishers will soon realise the need for distribution of all new publications in a standard electronic format. With electronic libraries access can be had via a modem from students or practitioners from remote locations. Much of the future law libraries effort will be directed to training in the use of electronic services. I believe multimedia titles can piggyback on the infrastructure set up for research resources such as Info One or Lexis. Much greater emphasis should be placed on electronic services when evaluating or accrediting libraries.
At many universities the growth of academic and administrative staff offices has been matched by the corresponding decline of teaching space. There is only so much space in the law building and something must give. It is suggested that the concept of telecommuting will eventually lead to the replacement of academic and most administrative staff offices in favour of home offices.
Residential colleges on campuses will become obsolete. Legal education can be undertaken in the students own home at any location on the planet.
Printed study material will also become obsolete and could be available on electronic notice boards in addition to dissemination by Universities on disk. Another technological advance is the advent of electronic study guides which are already used at QUT.
Electronic study guides give students the ability to easily modify prepared course notes with their own ideas and lecture materials. Students in the longer term can take their customised material into practice, forming their own database of legal information and precedents to enhance their professional abilities.
Electronic casebooks are presently being used at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinios Institute of Technology. Such casebooks include embedded cross referencing, extensive search capabilities, and ease of updating. Electronic casebooks put all course materials immediately in the hands of students thereby avoiding them fighting over the one frayed copy of the report in the library or Universities/students wasting time and money on photocopies. Similarly most of the current administrative memos and other assorted messages can be available in electronic form.
Examinations can take two forms - To test your ability or to test your ability in comparison with others. It is possible to create examinations which not only test your ability but tutor you in your weaknesses. Examinations can be turned into competitions: user/computer; user/user. You are asked a question, you make your selection or complete the task such as a written paragraph. You are able to review primary and secondary reference material at any time, or engage in an interactive revision seminar. If you get it wrong you are automatically given easier questions and remedial work. If you get it right you are given more difficult questions to fully explore your abilities. The examination may adjust to fully test a student's ability. The decline of the traditional law school will give rise to new challenges in course structure and the way in which legal courses are taught. Distance education will flourish as the preferred option for the vast majority of students.
Multimedia combined with the information superhighway offers immediate advantages in the dissemination of distance education materials. The initiative of open learning through television could be enhanced through distribution of interactive forms of instructional material through mediums such as the Internet, cable TV, satellite, and CDRom. A current CD Rom can store 100 - 150 volumes of law books or 275000 printed text pages or an hour of video. This represents a small part of future capacities. I predict that whole subjects, if not courses, including prerecorded interactive lectures and seminars, moot court simulations, electronic study guides and casebooks, will be presented in one inexpensive disk. Students do not have to be in this country to complete these exercises, the marketing possibilities throughout the world should be readily apparent. Distance education is the future of legal education. Technology will free us from the University infrastructure and will free the University from spending enormous amounts of money on infrastructure. What infrastructure that will exist will be shared amongst several law schools. We will no longer need to attend lectures in a lecture theatre, tutorials nor seminars at a set location, nor will we need to physically search law libraries for standard printed material; our electronic agents can do this work. Lecturer's could control their subjects from their own office whether at home or elsewhere. More effort can be devoted to content, presentation, and delivery rather than repetition of instructional materials.
Electronic sites could be established to distribute course material including multimedia programs, prerecorded lectures and access to virtual libraries. E- mail and video conferencing will enable direct communication with lecturers and the possibility of seminars and discussion groups. Students could interact with other students and staff through the information superhighway. Such procedures could overcome shyness and minority group prejudices.
The decline of the traditional law school and the growth in distance education will see a decline in the number of law schools with consequent staff reductions. Economies of scale and reduced costs will occur as multimedia courseware can be used by large numbers of students simultaneously from any location. One University may have thousands of students spread throughout the world. The University or consortium of Universities who win this race will be those with cheap high quality courseware developed by well known and respected academic or professional names. The advantages offered by telecommuting for both students and staff, convenience, and reduced cost will pull students away from traditional law schools.
Like all advances which have the capability of altering traditional patterns of thought there are a number of advantages and disadvantages to consider in implementing multimedia:
For students multimedia has the following advantages:
- Students are no longer passive observers but must interact and think about what they are doing
- Adaptive and individual teaching - programs which adjust to student ability
- Stimulation of critical thinking
- Increased computer literacy
- Ability to telecommute
- Learning experience more appropriate to modern students who are computer literate from an early age
- Quality distance education - same resources as internal students ie cases and materials and instructional materials
- Countering the dual problems of the lack of primary material and increasing class sizes
- Convenience - Students will be able to study the programs at their own pace, when they want, wherever they have access to a computer
- Assessment - immediate feedback on progress - built in tutoring in student weak areas
- Reduction in course costs through competition
- Increased student retention of ideas
- Uniformity in presentation of high quality material
For academics multimedia has the following advantages:
- Scope for innovative teaching methods
- Links with other developments such as databases and expert systems
- Data collection and student management issues
- High quality skills based learning
- Reduction in repetitive staff contact hours and the opening of further hours for research or improvement in teaching practices
- The development process hones lecturers skills in both understanding the subject, its presentation and instructional design
- Provides a method to move away from teaching at any particular standard - the programs can adjust to student ability
- Ability to telecommute
- Dehumanising
- Reduction in staff/student, student/student interaction
- Costs - programmers, infrastructure
- Hacking and data corruption
- Over reliance on multichoice questions in low level courseware
- Temporary limitations of computers in responding to open ended questions
- Updating costs
- Limited courseware life expectancies in certain subject areas
- Loss of academic staff
- Students not having access to computers
- Creation of an information poor underclass
- Multi-media should not be perceived nor used as a means of eliminating discussion between academics and students
At present there are only four types of programs possible with existing technology:
These early basic programs overemphasise multiple choice questions and are generally restricted to monolinear structures.
The above features are cumulative upon stage 1.
Multi-media, interactive video, CD Rom distribution, simulations
Stages 1-3 combined with multilinear structures, nested courseware with hypertext full text full featured linked libraries, natural language recognition, and nested rule based expert systems.
Multimedia may spurn a new continuing legal education industry enabling high degrees of interactivity linked to a central location but with unlimited distribution. The programs would be capable of mimicking reality and have unique advantages as a training tool. The boredom associated with talking heads and training videos would be eliminated. Interactivity would represent a significant advance in continuing legal education.
Law firms will also be major beneficiaries of the information revolution. Precedents, client marketing, in court presentations, inhouse training, World Wide Web kiosk information and marketing sites particularly for foreign clients, and communication generally is set to drastically change. There is no doubt that legal research has been forever altered by the availability of cases and legislation in full text search and retrieval systems. There have been obvious advantages in cost reduction and speed. I expect to see the establishment of links between law firms and Universities virtual libraries.
The thesis of this paper is that the traditional law school will be reshaped by multimedia computer technology combined with the information superhighway. We should expect to see the demise of lecture theatres, seminar rooms, large libraries, residential colleges and general infrastructure in favour of telecommuting. We should see the creation of larger law schools or consortiums offering quality distance education through a virtual law school giving access to interactive lectures, seminars, moot court simulations, and examinations combined with electronic cases and materials publications, study guides, continuing legal education materials and a large virtual library system.
Administrative staff
Virtual campus
Academic staff Virtual Law School Students
Virtual Law Library
Continuing legal education
Outside practitioners
. Student notice board
. Faculty notice board
. Unit Proforma
Lectures
Seminars
Workshops
Interactive moots
Unit bulletin board
Video conferencing
Practice exams
. Campus administration
. Law library
. Continuing legal education
[*] Lecturer in Law, Queensland University of Technology.
AustLII:
Copyright Policy
|
Disclaimers
|
Privacy Policy
|
Feedback
URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/JlLawInfoSci/1995/11.html