Lessons Virtually Learned
by
Patrick Wiseman

I have offered a course on law and the Internet, on the Internet, nine times since the summer of 1995. The course has evolved over the years, and I've learned some lessons, not only about how to conduct an online course, but also about some ways to enhance my more typical off-line courses. In this essay I describe those lessons briefly, with the disclaimer that both the course and this essay are always works in progress.

Rather than describe the course in any detail, I invite readers to visit the course Web site at http://gsulaw.gsu.edu/lawand/. An online, presentation-style version of this essay is available at http://www.wwwebbb.org/wwwebbb/presentations/lessons/. Some screenshots representative of this course and the online components of a few others, and illustrative of some of these lessons, are available at http://gsulaw.gsu.edu/pwiseman/gallery/online/.

Here, then, are the lessons, in no particular order (but for the last):

1. Simplify

Simpler is better, more often than not. In early versions of the course, I used every chat tool available for our synchronous meetings, from Internet Relay Chat (the most venerable of chat tools) to a Multi-User Dimension (an online "space" in which users can both converse and "build"). Although experimenting with different tools can be useful, it can confuse students. Now we use one tool for our relatively infrequent chat sessions.

But do not over-simplify. Some incarnations of the course home page have been so simple as to be cryptic. I now strike what I think is a happy balance between simplicity and instruction. Take care not to let the technology impede the pedagogy; both over-complication and over-simplification can do that.

2. Use the Right Tools

Different tools are suited to different tasks. In my experience, synchronous chat tools are suitable for chatting but not for doing much in the way of serious substantive work. While this may be a function of my teaching style, which tends to be more conversational than controlling, asynchronous tools (e-mail discussion lists, online forums) seem to me to be much more suited to the serious work of delivering content, discussing issues, working on hypotheticals, and so forth. Chat tools, on the other hand, are well suited to brainstorming sessions and very small group work. They can also be very useful for "office hours," if a couple of students need to ask me for clarification on course requirements or procedures.

Avoid use of tools that rely on user discipline. In early versions of the course, the discussion took place on a single e-mail discussion list, which was archived on a Web site. To keep the messages in subject-matter order, I asked students to choose the general subject category from a predetermined list and to use it in the Subject: line of their e-mails. As you might imagine, this met with limited success. Now, each week's topic has its own, separate forum and e-mail address, and it is much easier for students to post to the right forum than it is to remember specific subject categories.

Early on, I allowed the technology to drive the pedagogy; now, I try to make sure that the pedagogy is driving the technology.

3. Don't Teach

In a "constructivist" course such as mine (by which I mean a course in which students supply all the content), this is perhaps obvious advice: Make students do all the substantive work. But I think the advice has application to more conventional courses as well, where, even if the teacher knows more than the students, the most effective way for students to learn the material is to help them teach themselves.

As important as not teaching is exercising professorial restraint and resisting the temptation to intervene when the lesson will be as well, and probably better, learned if you don't. Sometimes, with the right technology, the pedagogy seems to take care of itself.

4. Take Risks

I provide an anonymous online site for my students to evaluate my courses as they proceed, risking hearing things I don't want to hear and providing an opportunity for inappropriate venting. I learn a lot from what students tell me on those pages, and so far nothing bad has happened. Unlike our usual course-concluding evaluations, which are of no help to the students currently in the course, continual evaluations, so long as I respond to them one way or another (which I do), give students a sense of ownership of the course.

Even (or maybe especially) risky use of technology can lead to pedagogical discovery.

5. Reinvent

Available online course tools certainly have their place, but I think many faculty members, after using them for a little while, find them constraining. Most faculty, of course, are not programmers and so have to live with the constraints, but if you either are or have access to a programmer, then I urge you to reinvent with abandon. Faculty are a creative lot and will come up with far more than anonymous online evaluations, dynamic syllabi, and course-based face books. Pedagogical innovation, if not a necessity, can be the mother of technological invention.

6. Build Community

It is probably important in any course to foster a sense of shared enterprise, but it is especially important in an online course where students will not see each other while engaged in the course. Provide ways for students to get to know each other, perhaps by meeting face to face occasionally, by inviting students to introduce themselves in a class forum, or by providing an online "face book" of student pictures.

Hold students to some community standards (respect for each others' contributions to the community effort, a responsibility to contribute, etc.). I have rarely had to douse a flame war, but I do, early in each offering of the course, remind students that they are lawyers, not pundits, and that their contributions to our discussion should reflect that role. And be sure always publicly to credit students who make particularly good contributions.

These and other strategies can increase the students' sense of engagement with the course material and with each other, thus improving the sense of community in the course. If community is pedagogically important, technology can provide it.

7. Accommodate Diversity

I'm not speaking here of the obvious (and legally required) need to make all course Web pages accessible to students with disabilities, but rather of the need to accommodate technological diversity. Unless you are fortunate enough to be in an environment where every student has state-of-the-art equipment, it is important to accommodate the lowest common technological denominator. So e-mail from your course Web sites should be in plain text, not HTML. And you should minimize the unnecessary use of images and video and other bandwidth-demanding bells and whistles. Often, low technology suffices pedagogically.

8. Automate

I am able to do things online that I would not dream of doing otherwise, either because they would take up too much time done manually or because there is no off-line equivalent. For example, providing students as a group with continual feedback on their forum performance (even if it's only quantitative) can be automated and is useful to them. Showing the passage of time on the class schedule or syllabus is not something that really has an off-line equivalent, but it has proven to be a popular thing to do. Even more popular (with my students, if not with my colleagues and associate dean) is my practice of allowing students to retrieve their grades by e-mail, something which I would not be especially happy to do manually for my 80-student first-year Property section. Also popular is my random selection of students for class participation, notice of which is automatically sent to the class forum at the beginning of each week. We also generate automatically, from our database of class rolls, e-mail addresses, and student ID pictures, e-mail distribution lists and online face books for every class.

But don't try to automate what cannot be automated. Giving individual, qualitative feedback probably cannot be automated. Grading non-objective exams probably cannot be automated.

Not only does pedagogy sometimes spawn technological innovation, but technology enables pedagogical innovation.

9. Reflect

As I have experimented with the use of Internet technology in my teaching, I have reflected on what works and what doesn't. I continue to do what works and to try new things. I have probably, on occasion, persisted in doing something that didn't work, in the belief that I was just not doing it right. Experimentation with technology and reflection on its pedagogical usefulness are invigorating and, I hope, keep my teaching fresh.