Developing the student learning environment at City University

Emily Allbon, City University

Presentation at UKCLE seminar on teaching and learning for legal skills trainers, 16 February 2005

This session looked at how Emily has developed tools in order to improve the student learning experience at City University. Key to this has been the creation of a portal for City students – LawBore. The session also looked at the use of CitySpace (WebCT) within the Reading the Law course, in particular how the system is used for setting assessments and assignments.

Emily has been Law Librarian at City since August 2000. She is currently in the second year of the Graduate Diploma in Law at Nottingham Law School via distance learning. Emily has written several articles on the development of LawBore.

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The Department of Law at City University runs three law courses; the LLB, CPE and LLM in International Law. Supporting each of these courses, with their different needs and time constraints, offers numerous challenges.

Use of WebCT

The LLB students undertake structured learning in the form of a Reading the Law module, run by myself. This module is composed of three one hour compulsory sessions designed to introduce the students to the law library and its resources, both hard copy and electronic. This has been run each year since I came to City in 2000, with modifications each year.

As part of this module students are set a series of assessments, which they must pass by 50% in order to pass the first year. Preparing for and teaching these sessions is demanding, particularly in terms of time, and the coursework marking yet more so. When City purchased WebCT (now rebranded internally as CitySpace) in 2003 I created a small module as support for the LLB students on my course. This was relatively basic and just contained support materials, PowerPoint slides from the taught classes and various reminders about what we had learnt. The main reason I utilised CitySpace was for helping with assessments. I re-worked the assessments from the previous years, coming up with four separate pieces; two quizzes and two workbooks. After completing session 1 on hard copy materials the students complete one quiz and a workbook on Halsbury’s Statutes. The quiz consists of a variety of questions covering the session contents and encompasses many different question styles; multiple choice, short answer, true/false and fill in the blanks.

The problem with using Halsbury’s is obviously that it’s an exercise that needs to be done by the library shelves, so the students downloaded the workbook, filled in the answers and entered up the answers online.

Session 2 is on LawBore and Lexis, assessed via another quiz, whilst the final session covers Westlaw. The final piece is more complicated and consists of a workbook which students download, type in the answers and then submit to me via CitySpace. This piece is the only one which is solely marked by me in the ‘old fashioned’ way. The lazy me considers scrapping it, but it is the only way I can tell the students have really taken the sessions in. It consists of a series of questions which require the student not only to give the answer using either Lexis or Westlaw, but also to say which part of the database they used and which search terms they utilised.

The use of CitySpace has really changed the face of the Reading the Law module, firstly by immediately getting students used to using PCs. The format of quizzes makes the assessments seem less daunting and bordering on ‘fun’. The students really like getting a mark instantaneously (even though it is often a conditional mark, until I’ve double-checked it). It’s great that students can now log on and complete work at any time from anywhere, and the chances of plagiarism are reduced slightly in that questions can be randomised.

Drawback-wise it does take a long time to set up the questions, particularly as you have to predict every possible answer a student may give; for example you must plan for the students who type in ‘&’ and ‘and’, as well as the problems associated with date formats. You do have to double-check marks on submitted coursework, as someone will always type in something unexpected as a correct answer. Of course typos occur regularly. There will be technical problems as well, and these can be difficult, especially where a student has left it until the last minute to submit a piece of work (very unusual!), and can’t get any support, as it’s 11.30pm and the work was due in before midnight.

We are aware that we have not yet exploited CitySpace to its full potential, and the Inns of Court School of Law and City are collaborating to produce a legal skills package in time for the 2005-06 intake. We are aiming for this to far more innovative than work to date, adopt various multimedia utilities.

LawBore

LawBore is the legal portal of City University which I developed in order to improve the use of free legal information on the Web and to motivate student use of varied resources – weaning them off a reliance on a trusted textbook. The site began life as a gateway to resources, but has since extended into much more than this; becoming a central resource for all types of information.

LawBore aims to guide the way to relevant resources by offering areas organised by subject and then into three areas; Web Links, Articles and Hot Docs. The top five of each of these appears on the front page, and then others appear on a subsequent page for keen students. The concept is that if students need to find something on a subject area of law and they don’t have long to research then LawBore can help them. It isn’t meant to be the be-all and end-all, but to inspire users that it is relatively simple to find quality resources.

Resources are chosen on the basis of reading lists and my own knowledge of what is pertinent to the students’ study. I get a feel for where the gaps in student knowledge are by what questions are being asked of me in the library, and I can go some way to righting this on LawBore.

Each resource in LawBore has a short description to enable the user to know what they’re getting before they click. Articles from subscription databases such as Lexis and Westlaw are deep-linked into LawBore to enable the really key pieces to be easily accessible.

Much time has been spent getting LawBore to look appealing to students; today’s generation are image-led and this is why much of the front page of the site is taken up with images. The images are reassuring as they follow users through the navigation process. Each resource on LawBore has a counter so you can see how many people have followed up on the link; this can enable ranking to take place if a link isn’t used much.

The site’s ‘community’ elements include a chatroom – the Forum, a noticeboard for internal messaging and an Exclusive Content section. This part of the site brings together articles written by current students, staff and past students. It’s also where I have persuaded past students to contribute pieces for a ‘Day in the Life’ section and a careers-orientated area. The idea being that advice pieces are taken much more seriously when you know the writer has been through exactly the experience you have.

A Mooting area was developed over the summer of 2004 in order to make a somewhat scary practice much more approachable for nervous undergraduates. The video clip idea came off the ground thanks to the help of two brilliant students and a professor willing to act as a grumpy judge. The clips have been well received, with the MootingNet.org.uk website describing them as ‘excellent’.

Future plans for LawBore include an alumni area to encourage our past students to keep in touch, and a Pro Bono area.

Last Modified: 30 June 2010