Buchanan, R; Pahuja, S --- "Using the Web to Facilitate Active Learning: A Trans-Pacific Seminar on Globalisation and the Law" [2004] LegEdDig 32; (2004) 12(4) Legal Education Digest 22

Using the Web to Facilitate Active Learning: A Trans-Pacific Seminar on Globalisation and the Law

R Buchanan & S Pahuja

[2004] LegEdDig 32; (2004) 12(4) Legal Education Digest 22

53 J Legal Educ 4, pp 578–593

Like any new technology, the Internet can be used in a myriad of ways to facilitate teaching. However, web-based teaching in universities is usually seen as a replacement for face-to-face student time with faculty rather than a supplement to or enhancement of in-class learning. Universities appear to be embracing the Internet because it promises to improve the ‘efficiency’ of learning by steering students more directly toward the ‘right answer’.

The authors’ project reveals a different possible trajectory for web-based teaching. Rather than replacing face-to-face class time, they facilitate active learning by using the Internet as a supplement to an in-class seminar. In 2001 a seminar titled Globalisation and the Law was taught for the first time simultaneously at Melbourne University in Australia and the University of British Columbia in Canada. The impetus for the course came out of a critical engagement with legal issues arising from globalisation and a concern that these issues were not being adequately addressed in the mainstream law school curriculum.

Although the collaborative project was made possible by both universities’ generous support of the development of new technologies for teaching applications, it was not the technological aspect that appealed. Rather, the project came about because they were sympathetic to each other’s critical projects and teaching philosophies and eager to collaborate. In the design and implementation of the course, the learning objectives emerged from the approach to the subject matter. In particular, students needed to develop a critical understanding of globalisation as a set of multi-layered and contradictory processes rather than a uniform or overarching narrative.

Each case study focused on a site in which many kinds of regulation intersect. There were a number of skills that students needed to develop, some linked to the particular subject matter, but also some skills of more general application. At the heart of this course was the effort to develop students’ capacities for critical thinking.

The course was organised into a series of modules, each oriented around a particular case study. Generally, each module had two parts: law and critique. At the beginning of the course, students were required to choose a class for which they would present the readings. Another tool used to a limited extent during the course was videoconferencing.

At the end of the course, the students were asked for both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Student surveys were administered in the usual way through each law school.

Active learning has been defined as more than a set of practices. Rather, it is an orientation of educators and institutions which shifts the focus of teaching away from the idea of delivering instruction and toward a notion of facilitating learning. The primary objective of active learning is ‘to stimulate lifetime habits of thinking’, and it is usually contrasted with teaching models which students learn by largely passive means. The evidence suggests that students also gain skills which help them to build functional intellectual frameworks that stay with them throughout their lives, rather than achieving the short-lived ability to reproduce certain fragmented pieces of information in response to clues most indicative only in a certain context.

Several elements of the course design were directed at encouraging critical thinking. Students were encouraged to question the assumptions behind any given perspective on globalisation and the law. Engendering critical thinking is a key component in challenging the student-as-passive-sponge model of learning and promoting active learning.

One of our primary goals was to encourage students to chart their own journey of discovery through the course. It was not expected that each student would leave the course with the same package of information, but it was thought that, by immersing themselves in the readings, following select links on the web site, participating in discussion threads that engaged them, and choosing and researching their own paper topics, they would shape their own learning outcomes. Another element fostering self-direction was the online discussion forum. Finally, the goal of promoting self-directed learning led to the choice of assessment. A major part of the assessment was a research essay on a topic of interest to the student.

The task of articulating the substantive and pedagogical aims of the course was facilitated by the twin processes of collaborative course development and web site design. It is apparently not uncommon to find that designing web-based products leads to a clearer identification of aims and objectives than those provided in traditional printed course guides.

The collaboration of teachers was similarly useful. Because they were teaching the same course in different places, it had to be clear exactly what they wanted to draw out of the materials and why. Instead of dividing up the writing of the modules between them, they designed and jointly drafted the online introductions to each module.

Collaborative learning occurs when students think of themselves as part of a community of learners and explore the ways in which effective learning can be accomplished through cooperative means. The benefits of collaborative learning are widely recognised and manifold. Students are said to gain deeper understanding because of the need to articulate their own ideas and respond to those of others. Ideally, they may also gain heightened appreciation of complexity and the cultural context through the engagement of themselves as social beings in the learning process.

We asked students to ‘workshop’ the responses of their organisations with their peers in both Vancouver and Melbourne and to speak in class with their organisation’s voice about the issue at hand. Probably the goal of fostering collaborative learning, particularly trans-Pacifically, was the least successful. The shared observation at the time of the course was that encouraging students to compare experiences was to some extent successful only when it interacted with the videoconferencing.

Looking back and considering the seasons for these kinds of responses, it was concluded that the forum was not constructed in a way that really required discussion between students. The course design should be altered in several ways to foster greater collaboration among students. First, more could be made of the role-play exercise by assigning the roles early in the course but conducting the in-class version toward the end. A second way to promote real discussion is to allow only those students posting an extended critique to start a new topic in any given forum, forcing students to be more responsive, initially to the extended critiques and then to other postings.

At its heart, the promise of globalisation is posited as making it possible now for individuals and groups all over the world to converse with one another and produce meaningful collaborations on a range of issues. But this experience suggests that the reality is somewhat more prosaic. Being in the same place, at least some of the time, is still crucial to meaningful collaboration, and certainly to transformative collaboration.

The lessons that can be drawn from this project emerge from the productive tensions that animated it: the collaboration, the engagement with students, and the institutional context in which the course was produced and offered.

The collaborative nature of the project required teachers to extend themselves across a number of dimensions. First, designing and writing the course meant that a lot of work needed to be done to clearly articulate everyone’s approach to the subject matter, as well as the pedagogical goals before the project could even begin. The second productive tension arose from the students being at once enthusiastic about the course, its content and its form, and somewhat resistant, primarily to the workload. Students in both universities identified the workload as significantly greater than in other law courses.

The third productive tension at play in the design and teaching of the course emerges from its relation to the broader institutional and social context. The course was proposed, developed and taught during a time when universities had come under considerable pressure to transform themselves along market models, and when the possibilities for multimedia Internet teaching applications were being widely explored.

While it may cut against the grain of recent developments in higher education, the authors believe that, when measured against their own goal of promoting active learning and critical engagement with the subject matter, the trans-Pacific web-based globalisation course was a success. For that reason, they are planning to continue and expand it.