PodLaw: developing a portable learning environment to enhance the study of law

In his paper at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2008 Chris Hull (St Mary’s University College) introduced PodLaw, the set of mobile resources he uses at St Mary’s to enhance his teaching, and demonstrated how easy it is to record a lecture or to convert slides and notes into a mobile friendly format – see Chris’ guide to creating mobile friendly learning materials below.

Chris started his session with a typically challenging statement – “Law is not intrinsically boring but can be made so.” He went on to describe the particular issues he faces in the joint honours BA/BSc in Business Law programme at St Mary’s University College in Twickenham, and how he has tried to address some of these by the use of mobile technology.

The typical cohort of students at St Mary’s are mostly first generation into higher education, they commute to university, work part time while studying and have a diverse range of learning styles and motivations. Chris shared the results of a survey carried out over the past two years to ascertain his students’ level of computer/technology access – the results were probably not surprising, but did confirm that while not all students have access to computers and the Internet, they all have mobile phones, MP3 players and/or iPods, and the vast majority of these devices have video capability as well.

According to Chris our institutions’ reliance on VLEs for the dissemination of information is not in tune with the current generation of students, who are looking for portability and flexibility in their studies as in every other aspect of their lives. His ingenious solution has been to use a wide variety of the free software currently available to provide lectures, interactive notes, reading lists and even multiple choice quizzes through students’ mobile phones, MP3 players and iPods.

Introducing PodLaw

The use of a VLE is fast becoming the norm in legal education, used at a basic level to disseminate information in electronic form. For the more advanced the VLE can be used for discussions, assessment and more interactive content, and in its evolved state is seen by many to be an excellent tool to enhance traditional teaching and learning methods. The VLE, however, has one flaw – portability.

In order to use a VLE you need to sit in front of a networked PC or laptop. This might sound obvious and beg the question: “So what is the problem with that?” The changing nature of our student cohort, with pressures such as work, travel and family commitments, means that they are increasingly unlikely to be able to sit at a computer to work through additional content – the intrinsic motivation is often lacking. Consider the student who travels into college by train or bus. S/he is unable to access a VLE and its rich content, and if s/he wishes to spend this time studying this generally means hauling around cumbersome texts to read or printed notes from the VLE – not particularly motivating is it? What about the person who works full time and studies an evening course, how do they access this content, perhaps whilst having lunch away from the work environment? The lack of portability is a major disadvantage with most current VLEs.

Many institutions have begun to explore the use of the iPod and other portable devices through the development of podcasts. As our society becomes more dynamic and the nature of our student cohort begins to change, portable learning initiatives may provide a welcome addition to study. Can an iPod be considered to be an educational tool? Maybe – participation has improved on my course, and the students are more engaged in their academic activities. Many of my students are kinaesthetic tactile learners, and tend to struggle initially with the study of law. The use of interactive content on an iPod has enhanced their development and understanding, as well as that of those considered to be auditory learners. The ease of use, accessibility and portability of the iPod has meant that students increasingly become intrinsically motivated, choosing to do activities for no other reason beyond the satisfaction of doing them.

Around two thirds of my students currently use mobile technology in their learning, accessing lectures and interactive lecture notes, reading lists and multiple choice questions with constructive feedback, as well as audio feedback on coursework, via their iPods. It is easy to make the conventional materials we use for teaching and learning available in a range of mobile friendly formats. Below is an overview of the methods I use at St Mary’s – if you are currently using PowerPoint, Word and the Web all this should be fairly straightforward. It doesn’t really create much more work (with the exception of podcasts and interactive iPod stuff). What you will do, however, is provide a simple means by which students can get access to materials and learn from them in their own time at their own pace – a way of supplementing learning.

I hope you find my advice useful. Please spread the word as to what I am trying to do – a bit of publicity never hurts when you are a young academic! I value your comments and of course also constructive criticism. If you would like me to come to talk to colleagues about making this work in reality, contact me on e-mail: hullc@smuc.ac.uk.

Creating mobile friendly learning materials

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PowerPoints to jpegs
Jpegs (compressed images) can be easily downloaded onto mobile phones, iPods and PDAs.

• with PowerPoint open go to ‘file’, ‘save as’.
• change the ‘save as type’ at the bottom of the box to ‘JPEG file interchange format’ and click ‘save’.

This creates a folder with each slide as an individual image within it.

Additional notes
We all produce additional notes, however not all students have Word viewers on their mobile devices. Consider instead converting the documents to text or PDF files.

Pdf995 is a useful PDF converter. It is free to download, so as long as you do not mind a bit of advertising when you convert the file it is perfect for the job. Basically it creates a pdf995 printer option within Word, so that when you go to ‘file’ ‘print’, you can choose the ‘pdf995’ printer, which saves the Word document as a PDF file.

The other option is to save your Word document as a ‘plain text file’. This removes most document formatting, making it small enough to download and view.

IPod notes
If you want students to be able to read notes on an iPod you will have to use a plain text file, with a maximum of 400 words. To get around this limit try iPod Note Packager. This converts your text file into an ebook, slitting the file into separate pages you can step through easily.

IPod Note Packager also allows you to convert webpages into ebooks. You lose any images, but the basic formatting is retained. This is great if you have a news article or journal piece you want your students to read.

Audio files
All desktop computers can record audio – you just need a mic. It is easy and cheap to purchase a digital dictaphone – I use Griffin’s iTalk Pro, which is excellent. Audio files often need to be edited – a useful tool is Audacity.

The problem with audio files is that they can be large. I recorded the first 18 minutes of my Learning in Law Annual Conference paper – in its original clear stereo format it is a huge 187MB! Using Sound Recorder, another free bit of software bundled with MS Windows, I compressed this to 2.12MB. The quality is very much degraded, but it is fine for the purposes of easy dissemination.

Interactive iPod content
If you want to explore the ability to make fun content for the iPod try using iQuiz. All fifth generation iPods have iQuiz on them, or it is simply 79p a download.

You will need iQuiz Maker, another free download. This allows you to write simple multiple choice questions, with options or just true/false. For a little bit extra I have found iWriter useful. For £15 you can create a full ebook with audio, hyperlinks, pics etc.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010