Wangerin, P --- "Technology in the Service of Tradition: Electronic Lectures and Live-class Teaching" [2004] LegEdDig 16; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 22

Technology in the Service of Tradition: Electronic Lectures and Live-class Teaching

P Wangerin

[2004] LegEdDig 16; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 22

53 J Legal Educ 2, 2003, pp 213–228

A starting paradox lurks at the centre of classroom teaching in law schools. On the one hand, anyone who has talked to law teachers knows that many of them insist that they do not lecture in their classes. On the other hand, anyone who has conducted ‘action research’ studies of classroom teaching in law schools knows that what occurs in many of them is precisely what so many teachers deny is happening, namely, lots of lecture teaching.

The explanation for why so much lecturing occurs in so many law classes can perhaps best be illustrated by a simple syllogism, as follows: major premise: law students can think critically and conceptually about legal issues only if they know something about the subject matters being discussed; minor premise: experience has shown many law teachers that outside-of-class reading assignments and research projects are often not enough to give students sufficient knowledge of raw information and sufficient understanding of important concepts; conclusion: law teachers who want their students to think conceptually and critically about legal issues will have to spend at least some time, and perhaps a lot of time, conveying information to students and explaining ideas to them. Lecture teaching is an excellent way to convey information and explain difficult ideas.

Lecture teaching is indeed necessary as a solution to the need-to-know problem. However, law teachers who deliver lectures during live sessions of their classes are taking class time away from the kinds of teaching that inculcate critical and conceptual thinking skills. Too many law teachers are spending too much time lecturing. It seems sensible to move lecture teaching to a time and place other than the class hour and to reserve class time for non-lecture teaching.

This paper describes computer technology that any law school classroom teacher working on any budget can use on a recurring week-to-week basis to create elaborate multimedia electronic lectures, even if they get little or no support from their school’s computer or media services staff and even if their students have 56K modem connections to the Internet.

Researchers universally agree that students learn best in a lecture setting if they interact with the lecturer — asking questions of the lecturer, for example. Unfortunately, not all students are eager to interact. Further, anecdotal evidence indicates that students who ask and answer lots of questions during class do not necessarily produce good work on exams and writing projects, and students who rarely or never talk in class sometimes produce terrific work.

Contrast now the feedback opportunities that electronic lecturers can offer. If the lecturer creates an electronic discussion to run alongside an electronic lecture, and if the lecturer then mandates participation in that discussion by all members of the class, probably 95 percent of the students viewing the lecture will engage in interactive, back-and-forth participation. Finally, and not unimportant, electronic lecturers can easily deal with the ten percent of students who want to ask and answer all questions. Feedback, though important, is not the only kind of interactivity that increases the effectiveness of lecture teaching.

Contrast now electronically delivered lectures accompanied by electronic learning activities. They can easily create discussions to run alongside the lectures. Further, they can easily create electronic assignments that coincide with electronic lectures. Electronically delivered lectures also can easily incorporate branching exercises.

All researchers and all experienced lecturers agree that graphically rich lectures — those accompanied by pictures, illustrations, graphs, charts and the like — work better, much better, than lectures consisting of nothing but spoken words. Regrettably, many skilled lecturers could not in the past act on this knowledge. Until recently, after all, display technology for classroom use was primitive. Slide projectors worked, of course, as did overhead projectors.

Modern technology has changed all that. Computer projectors now make it easy to project computer materials to large screens at the front of classrooms. More importantly, any person who knows how to use a computer can learn to use presentation software such as the now ubiquitous PowerPoint. Modern technology also allows anybody who has a computer to use simple, inexpensive software, such as Paint, which is part of the Windows operating system.

Note two important reservations about graphics software and lecture technology. First, some current available graphics software is either prohibitively expensive or extremely difficult to use. Second, nothing said here about the value of graphically rich lectures should be read to suggest teachers should use presentation software to deliver lectures during live classes.

Obviously, the fastest and easiest way to create electronic lectures is simply to record versions of one’s live classes and then convert those recordings into computer files. Unless a lecturer has great stage presence, a video recording of a talk-only lecturer will show only a talking head even if that recording is converted to a computer format. At least at first glance, Producer and comparable products seem to provide the perfect mechanism for creating electronic lectures. The Producer technology clearly is workable for a one-shot electronic lecture, but it probably is too difficult for typical classroom teachers to use for a whole series. The third problem with videotaped electronic lectures is by far the most serious. It involves distribution, and the problem is file size. Because video files are absolutely gigantic, a video-oriented lecture, even a relatively short one, will consume large amounts of computer space. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, law students who have access to electronic lectures tend to make very, very, heavy use of them in the days and weeks before exams, and servers are likely to undergo tremendous stress during that period.

It should be obvious that Internet — not intranet — distribution is the way to go. All students now have multimedia computers at home with some kind of connection to the Internet. And though the technology is rapidly evolving, at least now — and probably for some time to come — video-oriented lectures look choppy even if they are distributed to home computers over high speed Internet connections. In short, video is not ready for prime time on the Internet. There also is good news. A compromise approach can allow teachers to create electronic lectures that use fairly small amounts of computer space and thus can be distributed over the Internet.

For various technical reasons, the use of standard presentation technology to add narration to presentation will create computer files far too large for delivery over the Internet, even if the lecturer uses the still-image methodology. So those who wish to distribute their narrated electronic lectures on the Internet must use compression software to reduce the size of the files. Also, assuming that one wishes to distribute electronic lectures over the Internet, how should one do that, and where? And that question brings us to a wonderful bonanza for law school teachers. Both West Publishing Company and LexisNexis offer free course Websites that law teachers can use to host electronic lectures.

A serious conflict seems to exist at the heart of classroom teaching in today’s law schools. On the one hand, many law teachers believe that they do not lecture in their classes; rather, they believe that they teach in the ‘traditional’ way, avoiding lecturing and concentrating on conceptual and critical thinking skills. On the other hand, many law teachers actually do a great deal of lecturing in their classes, and they do so for a combination of reasons. First, they believe — correctly — that lecture teaching is a good way to provide students with information about legal topics. Second, they believe — again, correctly — that students will achieve success in school and in practice only if they possess a solid base of information about legal topics.

Electronic lectures can solve the conflict just described. If teachers use technology to move their lecture teaching to times and places other than live class times and places, they can spend as much time as they want delivering information to students through lecture. Time constraints no longer exist. Further, if teachers move lectures out of the live classroom, they can reserve all of the live class time for traditional law teaching — teaching that develops students’ conceptual and critical skills.