Building the legal education gateway

In this article from the Autumn 2006 issue of Directions Ann Priestley, then UKCLE Information Manager, gives an update on the Good practice in sharing resources in law project.

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Do you use resources created by other academics, whether from law or another discipline, in your teaching? Do you share the resources you create? New services aimed at enabling the average academic to find and contribute learning and teaching resources are now available, with the Jorum repository going live in spring 2006 and SOSIG, including the SOSIG Law gateway, relaunched in July as Intute. Specifically for law teachers, UKCLE has launched leGATE, a new service aimed at highlighting key resources to support your teaching.

At the same time it is recognised that there are significant barriers to the widespread take-up of resource sharing – and not just technical barriers. UKCLE’s Good practice in sharing resources in law project investigated the landscape in law, looking for new ways to promote the sharing of resources and to increase the findability of resources supporting law teachers.

Work on the project fell into two main areas:

1. Gathering the views of the legal education community – a survey was undertaken during May 2006 and a focus group was held with the UKCLE Associates in July.
2. Mapping of law participation in existing services – including projects, digital repositories and metadata collections. This exercise identified a number of services which will be targeted for the exchange of data with leGATE.

The initial goal of the project was to develop guidelines of good practice for sharing resources in law, however during the initial research period it became clear that resource sharing throughout higher education is not as widespread as was previously envisaged and has not reached the level of maturity for the development of definitive guidelines to be feasible. Consequently, the project has identified five key themes, with some pointers to effective practice.

The reusability paradox

Resources need context to be effective, but reusability is best without context. Reusing is a way to prevent ‘reinventing the wheel’, but institutions may require materials to be written to a specified format or style. Resources you create yourself reflect your own personality and teaching style – and can be fun to create. On the other hand, reusing other people’s resources can be inspiring – it is rewarding to see others using your work and to help colleagues in return for their help.

If we build it will they come?

Building and sustaining a user community is not trivial. The factors needed to sustain a ‘community of practice’ are not yet clear, and substantial support is required in terms of both technical development and information management. While a user community must emerge rather than be imposed, there is still a need for a facilitating role, and the community ‘home’ must have a baseline of content at the start.

What type of service?

It is essential to be realistic about what can be achieved, and to be clear about the service/s on offer. What is to be reused – content, tools, processes? Authors should be encouraged to take responsibility for depositing and describing their resources. Services need to make a trade-off between quantity and quality, in particular given the inherent difficulties in identifying best practice. A peer rating and reviewing system is a useful feature.

Technical, metadata and copyright issues

Technical churn is a fact of life – it is important to allow for slippage in the development of tools and to keep the platform simple, while ‘future proofing’ as far as possible. Metadata, including ‘tags’ and other forms of data about data, are vital to speeding up and enriching the search process. If services are to be interoperable it is important to create and maintain high quality metadata records, while also exploring complementary and more informal modes of resource description. Despite the apparent lack of clarity and knowledge re the copyright of learning and teaching resources, intellectual property rights are not as significant as many may fear, not, at least, until fully customisable resources are available.

The legal education information environment

Our survey indicates that law-based services are the most attractive solution, however a certain amount of advocacy work will be required on behalf of enthusiasts in order to engage their peers. The prevailing law school culture is a factor – notably the presence or absence of a team culture amongst law teachers. The nature of the information landscape for law, with a large and complex map of services and a reliance on proprietary datasets, may also be a barrier. Current information seeking behaviour may have a significant impact on the sharing of resources – but that is a matter that needs further research.

UKCLE aims to be a key source of information on the theory and practice of legal education, however, we face a number of challenges in relation to building the legal education gateway, which can be summarised in three questions:

1. How can we capture the debates from UKCLE events and conferences?
2. How can we better generate resources from the legal education community?
3. How can we support networking in the legal education community?

As academics law teachers are comfortable with, or at least accustomed to, the prevailing publishing model of submitting articles to peer reviewed journals. This process has a recognised system of rights and rewards, and is the key outlet for thinking in relation to academic research. Academic thinking about pedagogy is a rather different ball game! In essence our three questions come down to one fundamental issue – encouraging the legal education community to make its knowledge visible in new and hitherto unaccustomed ways.

New forms of electronic publishing are leading to attacks on the traditional model of academic publishing, with digital repositories offering an alternative or additional route to peer reviewed journals. UKCLE is developing a range of support services to enable the legal education community to explore more informal modes of publishing – watch out for our new e-learning weblog, Digital Directions.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010