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Thursday, September 11, 2008
In Search of a Law Teaching Marketplace of Ideas
As I noted in my last post, I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate more outside-of-the-casebook material in my classes -- like elaborate hypotheticals that aren't in the book.
One question I’ve had in doing this is whether law professors can and should engage in more production and sharing of free educational resources – much in the same way that developers of free software, as Yochai Benkler points in Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm (112 Yale L.J. 369 (2002)), develop and distribute free software without being ordered or paid to do so. More specifically, should law professors view it as part of their job and/or professional role to develop free educational materials to be made available not only in their own classes (or institutions), but in Web-based libraries of hypotheticals, PowerPoint (or KeyNote) slides, MindManager diagrams, or legal analyses that are made available to law professors (and, in some cases, law students) everywhere?
Of course, to some extent this is already happening. Academics, as Benkler points out in that article, already contribute articles to a common body of scholarship that is available to all of their peers. We also engage in some sharing of teaching materials, in blogs like this one and, with a quick search on Google or iTunes U, I can find numerous syllabi, podcasts, and other materials that give me a good sense of how some of my colleagues teach the same subjects I teach. CALI collects numerous lessons on its Web site (and I can easily add them to my courses with the TWEN course management system).
But I can’t help wondering if it would benefit law students and professors if this sharing of educational materials happened a lot more – and if law professors, apart from being rewarded professionally for their scholarly productivity and in-class effectiveness, were also rewarded professionally for making creative contributions to such a stock of free teaching materials – and for making such materials available on a Web site (or other electronic gathering ground) where everybody knows such materials can be found, and has some way to easily search, browse, and evaluate them. Such a one-stop shopping (or sharing) station for free law teaching materials would, I suspect, make it more feasible for professors to deviate from the casebook, and draw on written problems and multimedia tools outside of the stock of materials that a casebook typically provides. I suppose its possible something like this is already around (or emerging) and that I've simply missed it. If that's the case, please let me know where to find it.
Posted by Marc Blitz on September 11, 2008 at 11:47 AM in Teaching Law | Permalink
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Comments
An alternative approach is to have each law school provide a central site for accessing course materials. At NYU the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) has taken a step towards this by putting materials from some of our international law courses online. See: http://www.iilj.org/courses/default.asp.
Posted by: Kevin Davis | Sep 14, 2008 8:02:11 AM
Marc--
I don't think that the incentives have to come from promotion and tenure committees. There are other kinds of incentives as well. Some people give away their teaching materials (casebooks, teaching manuals, etc) to other professors in the hopes that they will adopt the materials and have the class buy them. So one incentive is money. Another incentive is the respect, admiration, and gratitude of peers. Another incentive is give-and-take (in order to take from the teaching materials commons, you have to give something). It might just be a matter of finding a platform--like hydratext or eLangdell.
All of that said, it does bother me that tenure and promotion committees don't consider "contribution to legal education" an important category. At best, after scholarship comes teaching ability; and after that, service to the school and the legal profession; and somewhere in there, perhaps there's a soft "collegiality" factor. But "working hard to be a good teacher and helping others to be good teachers" really ought to be something taken into account.
Posted by: Hillel Levin | Sep 12, 2008 9:59:42 AM
Hillel --
I think you're right. There are a number of different thoughts here, and it's worth more clearly distinguishing them. My first thought was simply that it would be nice to have a central location on the Web somewhere where legal academics could go to find teaching materials created by their colleagues. It seems like that wish is being answered by sites like the eLangdell site that John describes and the hydratext.org site that Christian has set up.
Second, those sites would be more successful if law faculty were professionally rewarded for contributing to such a teaching commons and (for that reason, but perhaps also for others) viewed it as a part of their responsibilities. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure whether professors need to be professionally rewarded for such a system to work well: It may well be that a good number of law faculty will have enough incentive to share interesting teaching materials with the rest of the academic world even if this incentive doesn't come from promotion & tenure committees, for example. But perhaps this will be clearer as sites of this sort arise and we can see how eager academics are to contribute. In any case, thanks very much for the comments and information.
Posted by: Marc Blitz | Sep 11, 2008 8:17:50 PM
It's called eLangdell (after the inventor of the casebook) and it's in beta right now. The 1.0 version will be launched on December 1, 2008 at www.elangdell.org. It's a CALI project and we will be loading over 700,000 cases from public.resource.org as getting started fodder for e-casebooks. It's also a website for sharing teaching materials both in small, closed groups and in creative-commons/open access ways. I will be posting more about this project at my blog at http://caliopolis.classcaster.org if you want to subscribe.
John Mayer
Executive Director, CALI
[email protected]
Posted by: John Mayer | Sep 11, 2008 3:23:07 PM
I think you're suggesting two different things. First, that professors should do this and view it as part of their job.
Second, they should be rewarded for it in the same way that they are rewarded for other parts of the job--primarily scholarship, but also, to varying degrees depending on the school and field, contributions to the practical development of the law, teaching excellence, and so forth.
If the second point were the case, the first would follow.
Posted by: Hillel Levin | Sep 11, 2008 3:03:26 PM
I've created a web-based system to do exactly what you describe. People can upload and share materials, and you can create a textbook or supplement as easily ad you can create a playlist in iTunes. I've added a bunch of materials for Property, which I teach, but I'd love to get others involved. You can check it out at http://hydratext.org From there you can click "What is this?" to get more info and you can request an account.
Posted by: Christian Turner | Sep 11, 2008 12:16:30 PM