DISTANCE LEGAL EDUCATION: UNDERSTANDING THE LIMITS AND COSTS OF A LIMITLESS, FREE TECHNOLOGY

From the 1999 CALI Conference for Law School Computing

Over the past four years, law schools and continuing legal education groups have made modest use of the Internet. Web sites for legal education have delivered schedules for upcoming classes or seminars, faculty biographies, or provided a catalog of available materials. But institutions seem to have bumped up against a glass wall in their effort to recreate law school classrooms online, or to reach lawyers with legal education. There are some notable examples of online law school courses and seminars, but clearly more needs to be done.

This presentation will examine multimedia applications, including new standards in streaming media such as SMIL (coordinating streaming audio with slides), that enable legal educators to offer online learning, with an careful eye on bandwidth and desktop computer limitations of the target audience. The economics of online education will also be discussed, from a practical standpoint of how much it costs to set up and maintain Web-based courses to more subtle issues of the impact on the sale of traditional, paper CLE course books and law reviews when the same material is free on the Web.

A comparison will be made between the Internet as primary delivery platform and supporting tool to classroom instruction in legal education. Subjects covered include: use of archived tapes and paper materials of CLE courses; use of multimedia posted by third-parties; and copyright issues in online materials.

This presentation will provide helpful answers to law school distance learning administrators, CLE directors and law school Webmasters.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• CALI Conference 1999
• technology
• legal education
• law school
• computing