CALI Spotlight

A new semester means a new opportunity to use CALI to help with your classes – whether you are a professor or a law student!  Next week our Director of Community Development, Sarah Glassmeyer, will be hosting two 20 minute webinars that will explain everything you need to know to start using CALI.

The descriptions for both read:

CALI(R) is a non-profit consortium of almost every law school in the country. We provide over 900 interactive tutorials in 35 legal subjects to our members. This 20 minute webinar will be an introduction to registering on the CALI website and using CALI lessons. Whether you are a law professor, librarian or student, this webinar should answer many of your questions about CALI.

The webinars will be Tuesday, February 18 at 12pm EST (Register here) and Friday, February 21 at 4pm EST (Register here).  It will be live and any questions you have will be answered.   Pre-registration is required.

Copyright Margaret Hagan. Used with permission.

On February 7, 2014, over 800 people gathered in New York City to hear presentations on “reinventing law.”  The presentations (which ran anywhere from 6 to 15 minutes long) covered a variety of topics. Some were theoretical, some were product pitches and some were reviews of tools and processes already being used.  The day wrapped up with a longer talk by legal futurist Richard Susskind.

Given the large number of speakers and the variety of topics, it is impossible to fully review the events of the day.  There was one thought expressed that really resonated with me – “being early often looks like being wrong.” This is something CALI has experienced first hand.  For instance, declaring “The Year of the Electronic Author“….in 1996.  It’s only now, almost 20 years later, that this seems like an actual possibility.

Our Executive Director, John Mayer, spoke at Reinvent Law about  a CALI project that we think is actually right on time – A2J Author(R) and the A2J Clinic program.  The short elevator description of A2J is that it lets legal aid attorneys and clinic students create guided interviews (similar to what you would experience in Turbo Tax) that allow individuals to create and fill out basic legal forms and documents.

Fortunately, John’s talk was video recorded, so if you weren’t in NYC and have six minutes to spare, you can still see it.   LXBN storified the live tweets if you want to see the audience reaction and John’s slides are on Slideshare.

In early November, two of CALI’s staff members – Elmer Masters and me (Sarah Glassmeyer)  – traveled to Park City, Utah to attend the Open Educations Conference.  We presented on our eLangdell Press open casebook publishing project and were also featured in a showcase of open textbooks. (More about that later!)  Open Education attracts educators from all levels of education and all over the world.  It was a fabulous opportunity to share what we’ve learned in creating open educational resources as well as learn from others.

Before sharing some of the neat tools and projects that we saw, I thought I’d first give a brief introduction to Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER).  If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with the terms Open Access, Open Source or even Open Law.  As you might expect, Open Education and OER are open tools and content used in education.

OER goes beyond textbooks and MOOCs. It’s software, it’s syllabi, it’s credentialing and more. It’s for formal and informal education and all levels, even post-graduate professional continuing education.  And unlike Scholarly Publishing or Open Law, much of the power to make education and OER open resides with the educators AND much of it doesn’t require any extra work on the part of educators. As with any of the Opens, the first thing that people latch onto is the cost.  Yes, OER will be free, and in a time where law students are paying upwards of $200 per casebook, this is no small consideration.  However, the real strength and benefit to OER, Open Source and the other opens is that it’s accessible and able to be remixed and improved upon by any and all who wish without copyright or format restrictions inhibiting the changes.

Open Education mainly just requires a commitment to sharing with other educators your creations that you are already making anyway.  Okay, so that’s a bit of a simplification, especially in some areas of formal education where there are state requirements for textbooks and curriculum.  However, in higher ed, informal education and professional education – the areas where you likely reside, Gentle Reader – there is a great opportunity for innovation and taking back control of our classrooms and pedagogy.  Fortunately, advances in technology make this easier than ever.

The one tool I heard mentioned over and over again was GitHub.  If you’re not familiar, GitHub is mainly a repository for code, but it can be – and is! – so much more.  Elmer and I used it as the platform for our eLangdell Presentation.  It can also be used to share documents, make books and host pretty much anything text-based that you’d like to share.  Think of it as a wiki x dropbox.    People can fork what you post, which means that they can make a copy and work on it on their own, make changes and it doesn’t affect what you have on your repository.  However, they can submit a request to add it to yours.  So you have the benefit of maintaining the integrity of your work with the opportunity to allow others to improve/change it AND you can use their changes in your work if you think it’s a good change.

Now, Git Hub can be a little intimidating and strange if you don’t have a reason to visit.  So I’m going to give you one.  Instead of ending this post with a list of links of the cool things that I saw at Open Education, I created a Git Hub repository on Open Legal Education.  (I’ve been meaning to do that anyway to collect all the code and tools I’ve been seeing in the wild.)    To see the list of tools from Open Ed, click on the file titled “OpenEducation2013.asciidoc”   It will open up and behave pretty much  just like a webpage.

Finally, I mentioned above that CALI was highlighted in a showcase of Open Textbooks.  Throughout that presentation, the total cost saved to students through the dozen or so programs mentioned was about $100,000,000.  Yes, you read that right, one hundred million dollars.    The organizer of the conference, David Wiley, challenged us to save students one BILLION dollars in the next five years.  I think it’s doable.

CALI, though eLangdell, has saved law students and the legal profession about 1.4 million dollars.    Our executive director, John Mayer, estimates that if law schools really wanted to, we could save our students 150 Million dollars.   So…who wants to join in and make this a reality?

Image: Open Education Logo  CC-BY 3.0 http://openedconference.org/2013/

Even though it’s only the end of October, it’s not too early to start planning for final exam time.  Here at CALI, our usage statistics go through the roof starting around Thanksgiving every year.  Accompanying this are lots of questions from students with registration issues, questions about authorization code contacts and lost passwords. I’m sure you get your fair share of panicked messages as well.  Now, none of us can do much to help the student that decides to register and take every CALI lesson 8 hours before their final exam, but with your help, we can make the transition into “Serious Finals Study Time” easier for everyone.

Early November is a great time to send out reminders to students via email or social media about CALI lessons and how they are a FREE study resource that your institution provides for them.  If you’re not feeling very creative, we have sample text available for these messages on our Marketing Blog: http://cca.li/ra  Another idea is to have authorization code cards available at service point desks in your library, tech offices and for faculty to hand out.  You should have received enough for every student back in August, but if you need more, templates to print your own can be found here: http://cca.li/rb  Please don’t post the authorization code on public websites, but you are more than welcome to post on password protected intranets and in emails.

By now your school has hopefully received a tube of CALI posters for you to display in and around your building.  There are several styles to choose from, some aimed at students and some at faculty.  If you have not received your posters, please let me know and I can send out replacements.  If you would like digital versions (including sizes optimized for vertical digital displays), downloads to those can be found here: http://cca.li/r9