Blum, E. Joan

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Why You Should Use a Course Web Page

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Boston College Law SchoolDigital Commons @ Boston College Law SchoolBoston College Law School Faculty PapersOctober 2001Why You Should Use a Course Web PageE. Joan BlumBoston College Law School, blum@bc.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/lsfpPart of the Legal Profession Commons, and the Legal Writing and Research CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in BostonCollege Law School Faculty Papers by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. For more information, pleasecontact nick.szydlowski@bc.edu.Recommended CitationE. Joan Blum. "Why You Should Use a Course Web Page." Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing 10, no.1 (2001): 15-17.Vol. 10 Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing Fall 200115PERSPECTIVESWHY YOU SHOULD USEA COURSE WEB PAGEBY JOAN BLUMJoan Blum is Associate Professor of Legal Reasoning,Research & Writing at Boston College Law School inNewton, Mass.Brutal Choices in Curricular Design ... is a regularfeature of Perspectives, designed to explore the difficultcurricular decisions that teachers of legal research andwriting courses are often forced to make in light of therealities of limited budgets, time, personnel, and otherresources. Readers are invited to comment on the opinionsexpressed in this column and to suggest other “brutalchoices” that should be considered in future issues. Pleasesubmit material to Helene Shapo, NorthwesternUniversity School of Law, 357 East Chicago Avenue,Chicago, IL 60611, phone: (312) 503-8454, fax: (312) 503-2035.By now, several years into the Internet Age,many of us who are the least bit technologicallysavvy or technologically curious use a Web page inconnection with our legal research and writing(LRW) courses. Most legal writing professionals inthis group find that a course Web page is essentialto making the course function well and thereforecannot imagine how they ever did without it. Ifyou are one of these people, this article is not foryou. This article is for those among us (a sizableminority if not the majority) who don’t use a Web page because a) they don’t need it, b) theirstudents wouldn’t use it, c) they don’t want toinvest the time learning how to set up andmaintain it, or d) all of the above. I address each of these objections in turn.A. You need a course Web page.How can I presume to tell you what you need?I don’t know the intricacies of your course or thespecific teaching methods you use. But what I do know is that any LRW course has numeroushandouts and assignments. Having a course Webpage will make your life much less hectic byhelping you maintain your focus on what is really important in the course—teaching yourstudents—and not allowing yourself to beconsumed by housekeeping details. I also knowthat we often struggle to create interestingproblems for our students and that the multimediahosting capability of a Web page opens up lots ofpossibilities for creativity in problem development.A course Web page can be an essentialinformation center for your course, provided thatyou require your students to visit it daily. If youput every handout or assignment on the Webpage, you can free yourself forever from having tokeep extra copies of handouts or assignments.When a student asks, just say, “It’s on the Webpage.” You will also save yourself (and theenvironment) from unnecessary photocopying.For example, you might want to offer yourstudents a supplementary sample memo. Somestudents might benefit from reviewing the sample;others might not. Putting the sample on the Webpage allows those who want it to gain access to itmore conveniently than if it were on reserve in thelibrary, and doesn’t leave you with a pile of extras. The course Web page is also a good vehicle forproviding answer keys for self-graded researchassignments and other materials that students donot necessarily need to print. (Many of us who usecourse Web pages take the view that we shouldn’tuse the Web page to shift the responsibility andcost of printing required class materials to thestudent. Thus, I hand out in class anything that I think everyone in the class should have in hardcopy.) The course Web page is a good bulletinboard for materials that students need to be able torefer to but don’t necessarily need in hard copy, forexample, a schedule of oral arguments or classpresentations or a list of opposing counsel. Finally, the course Web page allows you to post announcements between classes withoutoverloading your school’s e-mail server and toprovide answers to common questions thatstudents ask in person or via e-mail. (I’ve foundthis a particularly important use of the Web pagein the week or so before a major assignment isdue.) Judicious posting of answers to frequentlyasked questions contributes to students’ sense ofsecurity about information flow in the coursebecause they are assured that all importantinformation is distributed to everyone, not just to a small group. While I think just about everyone who has a course Web page benefits from using it tostreamline housekeeping, some of us find that themultimedia hosting capabilities of a Web pageprovide the additional benefit of allowing us to“A course Webpage can bean essentialinformationcenter for your course,provided thatyou requireyour studentsto visit itdaily.”B R U T A L  C H O I C E S  I N  C U R R I C U L A R  D E S I G N . . .  16PERSPECTIVESFall 2001 Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing Vol. 10develop novel problems for our students. Having aWeb page allowed me last spring to use a problemI could not have used without it. The probleminvolved a claim by MasterCard International that Pemberton Bar Review (PBR), a fictionalcompany, had infringed MasterCard’s copyright in one of its “Priceless” commercials. PBR arguedthat its use of MasterCard’s commercial was a fair use and not an infringement because PBR’scommercial was a parody of the original. Whethera work is a parody depends on whether its parodicnature can be reasonably perceived, not on theintent of the author of the second work. See Acuff-Rose Music Co. v. Campbell, 510 U.S. 569, 582(1994). As this question has an important factualdimension, the students needed to view the twocommercials several times in order to be able toargue either side. While the students could view the original MasterCard commercial atAdCritic.com, the PBR commercial was a videothat we produced at the law school for purposes ofthis assignment, and digitized and posted on thecourse Web page. Without the Web page, I wouldhave had to put copies of the video on reserve inthe library and students would have had to taketurns borrowing them. With 45 students in theclass, that would have been a recipe for anxietyand confusion. Knowing that, I would not haveused this problem, which with the Web pageturned out to be an excellent teaching tool. You can also use a Web page to point yourstudents to other relevant material that is availableon the Web. For example, for my “Priceless”problem, students representing MasterCard wereable to get factual data about their client from theMasterCard International home page. These wererich facts that I did not have to take the time todevelop. (I did have to develop corresponding factsabout PBR, the defendant, which I put on thecourse Web page.) In previous years, I used myWeb page to point students to relevant nonlegalsecondary sources that were not available in ourlibrary.B. The students will use your Web page.Just like the baseball field in the movie Fieldof Dreams, if you build it, they will come. Today’slaw students are computer-literate and have accessto computers (in the law school computer center if not at home). Although you may find anoccasional first-year law student who does nothave the technological competence to plug a URLinto a browser, the student will need to attain that minimal level of competence at some pointduring the first year of law school in order to usecomputer-assisted research tools. So long as yourlaw school provides Internet access for studentswho don’t have it at home, you are justified inrequiring your students to check the course Webpage daily and are therefore justified in using it asan information center for your course. Even though technical barriers to access areminimal, students still need to be motivated to goto your Web page regularly. You can announcethat checking the Web page is a requirement of thecourse, but students will not go there unless theyfeel that there is something on the Web page thatthey can’t get elsewhere. The way to motivatestudents to go there is to use it for importantcourse materials and announcements. Resist theimpulse to send global e-mail messages to givereally important notices that you want to be sure everyone gets. If students think that there is a significant possibility that they will misssomething important if they neglect to check theWeb page, they will be sure to check it regularly.C. You don’t have to spend a lot of time setting up and maintaining a course Web page (unless, of course, you want to).While some people enjoy learning how to setup a Web page from scratch, I have never felt theurge to do so. I’m interested in the utility a Webpage brings to me, not in the experience ofdeveloping one. Thus, I have been content to useprepackaged Web courseware products. From myperspective, using courseware for a course Webpage is like using a bread machine to bakehomemade bread: you don’t have the sameexperience you’d have starting from scratch anddoing every step yourself, but you get a result thatis the functional equivalent. Over the three years I’ve had a course Web page I have used two products—for two years WebCourse in a Box, and this past year WebCT, whichis now the preferred Web courseware for BostonCollege. Web courseware like these products isdesigned for people who are not technology“Just like thebaseball field in the movieField ofDreams, if you build it, they willcome.”Vol. 10 Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing Fall 200117PERSPECTIVESexperts; most novice users find courseware easy to use because it has convenient preset features,including categories for announcements,handouts, and links to other resources.Courseware also gives the user easy-to-followprotocols for uploading documents to the Webpage. Most courseware will convert small pieces of plain text to HTML (Hypertext MarkupLanguage), and thus allow the user to avoid onestep in the process of putting material on the Webpage, at least in the case of very short documents.If you want to put a longer document on yourWeb page, you can use a conversion program (I use Front Page Editor) to convert a word-processing document to HTML, or you can usetools within your courseware package to link non-HTML and non-text materials to your Web page.I used one of these tools (and about four mouse-clicks) to upload my “Priceless” video to myWebCT site.D. Don’t be daunted—help is on the way!Even if each objection can be overcome, youmay feel that no matter what benefits it offers,launching a course Web page is not high enoughup on your list of things to do. You may feel thatyou simply do not have the time to do it, evenwith the help of prepackaged courseware. You maythink that the potential benefits do not outweighthe costs in terms of time. To this objection, I sayget some help getting started. Even a half-hourspent with a member of your law school’s technicalstaff may be sufficient to get you up and runningwith courseware. Use the technical staff or theample support that courseware vendors provide to help you the first few times you try to uploaddocuments. Putting documents up on your Webpage will become second nature sooner than youthink. * * *Sooner or later all of us (except the totalLuddite holdouts) will be using Web pages inconnection with our LRW courses. Using a Webpage will enhance your teaching not only becauseit will free you from some housekeeping chores,but also because it will open up possibilities formore creative course content. With today’s easy-to-use courseware and ample technical support, justabout everyone can launch a course Web pagewith minimal effort, so I urge everyone to take theplunge. I’d be interested to hear about what youdo with your Web page—please contact me atblum@bc.edu. © 2001 Joan Blum“Puttingdocuments up on yourWeb page will becomesecond naturesooner thanyou think.”

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