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Mayer, J --- "CODEC: Lowering the Barriers to Inter-institutional Distance Legal Education" [2005] LegEdDig 38; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 7

CODEC: Lowering the Barriers to Inter-institutional Distance Legal Education

J Mayer

[1993] LegEdDig 77; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 7

39 Law Teacher 1, 2005, pp 82–92

Law schools can use distance legal education (DLE) to offer courses or certificates to their students from instructors who are not at locally available institutions. Faculty members can team-teach a course between schools with both sets of students benefiting. Course sign-ups for which there are insufficient students at one school can be increased by spreading the offering across several schools. Law schools can share courses with institutions in other countries, better preparing students for law practice in a global economy.

Law schools compete for students and it is sometimes difficult to get institutional co-operation if there is too great a perceived benefit for any one of the participating institutions. The nature of delivering quality legal education at a distance is not well understood by most faculty members. This is new territory using new technologies and there is a need for a system that allows for student and faculty feedback to promote iterative and incremental improvements, experimentation and sharing of best practices. The best models for DLE are not yet definitively known or understood.

What are the potential benefits of DLE to law schools and faculty? (1) Law schools could share instructors to offer a wider variety of courses to their students. A law school with a small faculty in one speciality area could enhance its offerings and create new certifications or a law school could trade expertise in one area for expertise in another area with another law school. (2) Faculty members who want to teach courses that cannot attract enough students locally could use DLE to justify offering the course. (3) Best practices in DLE can help to improve classroom teaching and assessment. (4) New markets for legal education beyond law students could be addressed by instructors from different institutions to generate new revenue.

CODEC is an attempt by the Centre for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) to address all of these issues. ‘CODEC’ stands for the Consortium for Distance Education form CALI. CALI is all about DLE. CALI currently publishes over 400 computer-based tutorials written by US law faculty for law students. It currently has 194 US law school members comprising more than 95 percent of the ABA accredited law schools. Around 100 faculty members have authored lessons for CALI and more than 50 faculty and law librarians are members of CALI’s Editorial Board which reviews new lessons prior to publication. In short, CALI is a non-profit distance legal education entity with strong ties to the communities and people who are most likely to be interested and engaged by CODEC’s activities.

The main purpose of CODEC is to reduce administrative barriers between law schools wishing to offer to obtain DLE. All of the activities mentioned earlier can be done without a consortium like CODEC, but this solution does not scale well between 200 institutions. CODEC will build a web-based unified catalogue of distance learning law courses that includes a centralised registration system for all students taking consortium-affiliated courses. CALI staff and consultants will build this web-based database system.

Law schools who allow their students to take DLE courses will direct students to the CODEC website to register for the courses. Local registrars will then be able to download their own student registrations as standardly formatted data and it will be their responsibility to enter the course registrations into their own local administrative computing systems. CALI will work with consortium members to design a standard data format for all of these interconnections. Everything will be over the web via registered accounts, secure passwords and high-reliability hardware.

When you cross institutional borders, there are all sorts of assumptions that get tossed out. Different grade-curve policies and different academic calendars are two that are immediately obvious. CODEC will endeavour systematically to gather this information from law schools, to be turned into a web service that allows faculty members to enter grades in the local currency and have the system automatically translate the grades into the distant student’s expected scrip.

One of the second-order effects that CODEC may facilitate is an improvement in legal education generally. There is very little peer review of teaching in legal education. Perhaps CODEC and the use of DLE generally will encourage a virtuous positive feedback cycle where faculty members can improve their teaching techniques. Using DLE, law schools may start to think about legal education for markets beyond the JD-seeking law student. The most obvious market is continuing legal education. Many law schools offer CLE courses, but the biggest providers are commercial companies and bar associations. Law schools have a natural potential market in their alumni and, in some cases, a powerful brand in their local or national reputations.

As we all know, it is a global world and who better to teach students about law in other countries than law teachers from those countries? CODEC is initially concentrating on services and information for US law schools, but it is hoped that law schools outside the US will also participate. CODEC is a CALI project and is currently funded by CALI and by an additional subscription fee paid by CALI members. DLE is not a panacea or a lottery ticket or even a product that you buy and install. It is a bundle of ideas that can push innovation into the area of traditional legal education. It can ensure that excellent traditional legal education is reflected in the online world. CODEC is an initiative to smooth the path to DLE implementation, lower the administrative barriers to inter-institutional co-ordination and highlight best practices as they are discovered and vetted.


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