Muntjewerff, A J; Leijen, J J --- "Unplugging Blackboard" [2005] LegEdDig 48; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 21

Unplugging Blackboard

A J Muntjewerff & J J Leijen

[2005] LegEdDig 48; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 21

39 Law Teacher 1, 2005, pp 57–69

Electronic legal education involves the use of information, communication and instructional technologies to enhance student learning of the law and to provide law teachers with environments and tools for teaching the law. With the fast growth of the Internet many law faculties are moving their education and training into web environments. Such environments enable a more integrated approach to technologies in legal education.

We would suggest a thought experiment: what would happen in academic legal education if we unplugged such environments? What would law teachers miss and what would law students miss? This thought experiment is used as a strategy to draw up an inventory of what teachers and students consider the most valuable tools for their teaching and learning. We do believe that electronic learning environments may provide important added value to a law curriculum. However, we must realise that for teachers, the real problem in using an electronic learning environment is not primarily in the technology but in designing electronic instruction for learning the law effectively and efficiently. Electronic instruction requires new materials for learning the law.

With the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) a wide range of new possibilities emerged. Researchers and practical html gurus explored the use of WWW techniques for teaching. Several years later database-driven web suites, designed for education and branded as an electronic learning environment or a set of course management tools, appeared.

In the late nineties, Dutch faculties of law started experimenting with such electronic learning environments. These pilot projects were mostly initiated by enthusiastic teachers. The commercial literature emphasises concepts such as flexible learning, a student-centred approach, learning innovation, support for competence-based learning, improving communication and interaction facilities, etc. It claims that through the use of an electronic learning environment faculties are able to cut costs and save time by shifting tasks from teacher to computer — e-learning as Swiss army knives for education improvement. Guidelines to best practice in electronic learning environments are still in their infancy. The main usage of the electronic learning environments consists of what we call ‘communication’ functions.

The authors propose a typology of e-materials for learning the law so that teachers can decide what type of electronic materials is already available, what materials are still missing and what materials should be developed. Coaching systems help students to acquire and practise skills in applying domain knowledge. They assess and offer feedback to students. In doing so, they differ from instructional systems that only present domain knowledge and that only check whether the student has understood the presented material. The following functional components of a coaching system are generally distinguished: (1) an environment to enable the task to be learned; (2) a monitoring component to observe and interpret the student’s behaviour while performing the task and to identify any deviation; (3) a diagnoser to identify the cause of the deviation; (4) a coach to assist and instruct the student; (5) a student model; and (6) a repository where the information about the student is collected to build a model of the individual student.

Coaching systems may differ in three ways: (1) the degree of similitude between training environment and actual environment; (2) the degree of freedom the student has in performing the task; and (3) the degree to which a coaching system is able to ‘understand’ what the student is doing and what her results mean.

A task is always performed in some kind of context or environment. This environment defines or instantiates some problem or goal to be achieved and specifies or makes explicit the conditions in which this problem is to be solved or this goal is to be achieved. In learning to acquire skill in using an interactive computer program, the user may recognise a need for some piece of information and so she may question available help facilities. In both quantitative and qualitative simulations an explicit and general representation of the task makes it possible to present a full simulation of the real-life task. The environment and the coach are quite different. Where the environment simulates the problem situation that defines the task to be learned or trained, the coach oversees the learning or training of the skill to be acquired.

The major problem in designing and implementing electronic instruction, i.e. coaching systems, is the lack of robust and explicit conceptual models of legal knowledge and legal reasoning. Models of knowledge consist of models of the knowledge structure and models or patterns of reasoning. To structure knowledge in a system by classifying entities on characteristics has as a major advantage that similarities and differences between entities become visible.

The current success of e-learning systems lies in the way they may help to improve communication between teacher and student through the distribution of information and course materials. Several characteristics are critical for this success: easy web-based interfaces, personalised content after login and powerful user management. However, in our rush to post up content, we have forgotten the essentials of feedback and coaching that the research literature of the past 30 years and more has proven to be effective. This approach needs to be applied to the jurisprudence of legal analysis. Its development is difficult in the short term. The rewards for both students and staff, however, far outweigh the ‘glass book’ of current e-learning applications in legal education.