Introducing quizzes and discussion boards on the Bar Vocational Course

Michael Chapman, Inns of Court School of Law

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

The City University, City Law School introduced WebCT Vista 2 on the Bar Vocational Course in autumn 2003. This was the first time that the School had attempted to use e-learning on any of its courses, and almost everyone involved found themselves on a steep learning curve. With the benefit of one of City University’s Teaching and Learning Fellowships Michael was able to monitor the use and effectiveness of this new technology. His findings highlight some of its strengths and weaknesses and also possible methods of maximising the benefits for all concerned.

Michael is a Senior Lecturer and coordinator of C&IT at the Inns of Court School of Law and a practising barrister. Prior to joining the School he was responsible for developing the innovative biclaw interactive website and also wrote for The Lawyer on the use of IT by barristers.

In 2003 the City Law School, based in the Institute of Law at City University, decided to introduce e-learning onto the Bar Vocational Course (BVC). Prior to then the course had been delivered in three different ways; large group sessions, small group sessions and student directed classes. It was intended that e-learning would complement the large groups sessions and replace the student directed classes.

The introduction of e-learning on the BVC was enabled by the adoption across City University at the same time of the WebCT Vista virtual learning environment (VLE). Because of the relatively early start time for the BVC, City Law School was the first school within the university to go live with the new system. Inevitably therefore it was a steep learning curve for both staff and students.

One of my initial tasks was to identify the extent to which our students had already been exposed to aspects of e-learning. The results of our pre-joining IT survey showed that although most students had used VLEs before, relatively few had used discussion boards as part of their academic law courses.

We focused on two specific aspects of WebCT Vista as being appropriate for use on the BVC:

The assessment tool, often referred to as quizzes. The assessment tool allows a tutor to set a range of different types of questions for students, for example multiple choice questions (MCQs), multiple multiple choice questions (MMCQs, or MCQs with more than one right answer), short answer, true/false. We were particularly keen to use MCQs as the Civil Litigation, Criminal Litigation and Evidence streams are all assessed at City Law School through multiple choice tests (MCTs). It was of course always important to stress to students that, although WebCT Vista would refer to what they were doing as an ‘assessment’, so far as we were concerned the actual results of the quiz didn’t matter. Similarly, we had to remind students that the actual MCTs when they came would be sat in exam conditions with a pencil and paper. Nevertheless, it was felt that testing students throughout the duration of the course using the same technique as their final assessment must be sensible.

The discussions tool. This was intended to replace the student directed classes, particularly within the Legal Research and Analysis stream. In those classes students had been timetabled without a tutor to attend a classroom for a full one and half hour slot, and been set a specific task to complete, typically requiring elements of research and then also discussion. These student directed classes had been the subject of considerable negative student feedback.

We also used WebCT Vista for the release of materials. One problem here that took almost the whole year to resolve was that effectively you could only upload one file at a time. Discussion boards were also offered as complementary to large group sessions.

In terms of where we used these tools, the quizzes sat alongside large group sessions. The principle was that each large group session would have a corresponding set of quizzes. Depending on the time available, students would be asked to undertake the quizzes at various points during the session or expected to complete them at some time afterwards. The intention was to test comprehension of a particular topic, to offer illustrations of the way that a particular issue might be encountered in practise, and finally to reinforce recently acquired knowledge.

Student response to these quizzes was mixed, but with a generally positive edge. Negative comments tended to focus on perceived value for money, linking the use of quizzes in large group sessions with a waste of time and a lost opportunity to receive wisdom from the mouth of a lecturer. However, this feedback was in the minority. In general students had two linked views of the use of quizzes; that they were a welcome change of activity during a one and a half hour lecture, and that they usefully reinforced the points that had been made by the lecturer. Many students noted that the quizzes were very useful at a later date, when they were revising for the MCTs, to be able to go back to a quiz and revisit their understanding of a particular topic. Quizzes have continued to be used in large group sessions in this academic year.

As mentioned above the primary use of discussion boards was in the Legal Research and Analysis stream. Each tutorial group of 12 students had its own discussion board, moderated by a Legal Research tutor, although there was no way of preventing students from one group accessing the work of another. Initially there was no reason to see why we would want to prevent them doing that. Their use was structured as a series of ‘WebCT Classes’, which then fed primarily into Legal Research and Analysis small group sessions. The course was set up in such a way that prior to a small group session students would be required to undertake various research or analysis activities and then post the results on the discussion boards. They would then discuss contributions with the members of their tutorial groups. At various times their tutor would contribute the discussion, guiding students away from irrelevant issues and towards the right direction.

Tutors would then typically print off the results of the discussion prior to the related small group session, and use the session itself to focus on those areas of difficulty identified by students in the discussions. This would allow more time in the 90 minute slot to be devoted to those areas that apparently needed it, and avoid too much time being spent on things that were already understood. As an aside a tutor could know if a topic was understood from the results of the online discussion.

It was felt that there were many obvious advantages to this use of discussion boards, aside from those mentioned above:

• students could work at a time and place of their own choosing, no longer tied to a timetabled room
• students could receive feedback on their work, something craved elsewhere in the course, ie advocacy

However, the discussion boards in general did not prove to be a successful component of the course. There was considerable resistance amongst students to posting messages on the boards, even with the encouragement of initial messages from tutors. Feedback from students was quite negative; particularly galling in the circumstances of what the discussion boards replaced, was the relatively frequent comment: “it would be easier for us just to be timetabled to meet up in a room somewhere”. And despite the fact that there was never any suggestion that the WebCT classes were an optional add-on to the rest of the class, many students did not post on the boards. There were in any event technical difficulties, which exacerbated student negativity – students were logged out too quickly, which meant long discussion messages got lost, and the default setup only showed 10 messages at a time, so many students did not realise that there were more messages elsewhere.

One explanation of this resistance was given by staff use of discussion boards. A frequent complaint at staff meetings was, effectively, “we don’t talk to each other enough”. The suggestion of staff only discussion boards on WebCT was warmly received, but the reality was a different matter. I set up a discussion board for Legal Research tutors, to enable us to discuss any issues arising from teaching the course. Within a couple of hours I had the following response: “I already have to check e-mails all the time. Having the additional burden of logging into WebCT to see if someone has posted any new messages is a waste of my time. Last year we did it by e-mail. Why can’t we still do it by e-mail?”.

I felt there was a lot of merit in this suggestion. We are perhaps overwhelmed by sources of information. Adding one more to busy staff without offering any particular benefit was perhaps unreasonable. What can a discussion board achieve that can’t be done by a round-robin e-mail? One can imagine the reluctance of some students to log especially into WebCT to see if anyone has said anything interesting yet. It clearly became the first thing that they dropped off their list of priorities.

The exception to this experience were the part time students, who ironically had come to the course with the least experience of using discussion boards before they began the BVC. Their use of the discussion boards was generally enthusiastic and, at times, overwhelming. The problem for us was now that we had rather too much information to moderate, too many long messages being posted which finished with the phrase: “Michael what do you think?”. It was this extra burden that we had primarily feared when we introduced the discussion boards, and it put the full time students’ failure to contribute in somewhat lighter relief.

It is interesting to compare our experience of discussion boards with that of the University of the West of England (UWE), who indicated at the Bar Providers Conference in July 2004 that their course discussion board had almost been a victim of its own success. Its beyond the scope of this paper to identify the factors that distinguish UWE’s discussion boards from ICSL’s, but I suspect that a course size of say about 100 is right for general discussion. As our discussion boards were based around tutorial groups of 12, tutorial groups that were spending four days a week in each other’s company in any event, one can see that there was perhaps little incentive to start typing something into a computer.

It is perhaps also worth mentioning the large group session discussion boards. These remained largely dormant during the year, although the one for drafting did provide some interest as an online romance apparently developed on it.

This year, therefore, we have developed a different approach to discussion boards, to see whether there is any interest in using them as an add-on. Rather than focus work on the boards, students are required to undertake the work alone and then use the boards to discuss difficult issues or to obtain tutor feedback. The result has been a very low level of usage among all students, including part timers.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010