Resources for teaching law online

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen some dramatic changes in the state of the world.  Associated with that, in Australia and overseas, law schools are moving to online delivery of legal education.  For a lot of us, it might be the first time we’ve ever delivered a law class entirely online.  Here are some resources for teaching law online that I have started to collect from different blogs and other sites.

I will add more materials when I come across them.  But please feel free to send suggestions, articles or other links that you think it might be useful to include.

Blogs

• Best Practices for Legal Education:  This Albany Law School blog is publishing articles right now on tips and tricks for working with online learning in law school.

Designing online teaching

• ‘Next Week, You Will Teach Your Courses Online’: A Reassuring Introduction to Pandemic Pedagogy:  A clear and helpful article on making quick transitions to online learning from Creighton University Graduate School.  It is a link to SSRN, but the full text is downloadable.
• Library of guidelines and tips for teachers and students about teaching online:  A virtual library of materials about teaching online from Touro University. And it’s an incredible resource that is going to be valuable in a post-coronavirus world.
• TEQSA’s Online Learning Good Practice: The Australian tertiary regulator has published a curated list of materials and guides for teaching online, including materials to support student experience. They’re also rated from ‘beginner’ to ‘advanced’ users.
• Five tips for moving teaching online: A great, short, blunt list of things to do (and not do).
• Example online lesson plan:  An example of a lesson plan for delivering an entire course online. It includes things like synchronous and asynchronous activities and making sure that materials are accessible to everyone.  And you are welcome to use it as a template for your own planning.
• Centre for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI): A curated list of tools and software to support your online teaching.

‘Doing’ online teaching

• Five things I’ve learned (so far) about online tutorials: Some reflections on how to actually do online tutorials.
• Using the Socratic method online:  Jeannie Suk Gerson writes about how she prepared and delivered Socratic method classes using Zoom.
• Managing Zoom exhaustion:  Yep, its a thing and here’s some ways to manage it.

Webinars and videos

• Conducting simulations online:  A YouTube video that was hosted by the ABA’s Section on Dispute Resolution.
• Best Practices for Teaching Online:  A recorded webinar by a panel of experienced online law teachers from the Mitchell Hamline School of Law.  It is incredibly clear and helpful.
• Making videos for online learning:  A short recorded webinar on how to make videos for asynchronous learning online.
• Introduction to Australian constitutional law:  An example of a video I created as a welcome to a course.  And it only took a single afternoon with a phone, a rubbish tripod, and some basic editing.

Online tools

• Using Zoom:  A short (22 minutes) tutorial on setting up and running Zoom for online teaching.  And it’s produced by a teacher!
• Parampara:  Want to keep in timely contact with students but struggling with the time to catch up in person?  Or having trouble answering all the questions? This Facebook Messenger-styled chatbot is incredibly easy to set up and use.  And they are offering an account for free!
• Flipgrid:  Free for educators. This lets you create a video discussion board for classes and topics.  You could use it to let students post short videos giving their response to questions, prompts or topics.  There is a detailed guide book to look at so you can figure out if you want to use it.
• Screencastify:  A really simple recording tool which works as a plugin for Chrome.  You can record yourself, your voice and the screen.  There is a small fee to use all the features.

Online training

• Foundations of Virtual Instruction:  If you have a little more time, Coursera offers a MOOC that puts online teaching into a broader pedagogical context. But it is directed at primary and secondary students. I did the MOOC three years ago and found it really useful.