Turning GOV into OER: The eLangdell Press Experience

CALI - The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction

Figure 1. The whole entire CALI staff

How Six People Saved Law Students Over a Million Dollars in Two Years

And we are…

Sarah Glassmeyer

@sglassmeyer

sarah@cali.org

Elmer Masters

@emasters

emasters@cali.org

What is CALI?

Non profit consortium of law schools
Ed Tech Skunk Works
Publisher of Educational Materials

Law School Pedagogy

Figure 2. Portrait of Douglas, 8th Duke of Hamilton, on his Grand Tour with his physician Dr John Moore and the latter’s son John By Jean Preudhomme

Law School Pedagogy, con’t.

Not much different than other professional preparation
Rooted in Classics and Philosophy
Appreticeship to "read law" with practicing attorney

The Langdell Innovation

Figure 3. Source:Samuel F. Batchelder, Christopher C. Langdell, 18 The Green Bag 437 (1906)

The Case Method

Figure 4. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidortez/ CC BY-2.0

The Case Method, Con’t

the original "Flipped Classroom"
No texbooks - students read legal cases
Socratic Method to determine law

The eLangdell Project, A Brief History

Figure 5. Original concept art for eLangdell

2005-06 - Rip, Mix, Learn
A platform for law faculty to build course materials

A Brief History, Con’t

Figure 6. A fuzzy logo

2007-09 - Team up with Berkman Center
Morphed to Legal Education Commons
Hoping to spark innovation in legal education

A Brief History, Con’t

Late 2010 - eLangell Press
Open source, CC licensed casebooks, statutory and rules supplements
EPUB, .mobi, PDF, and .docx

Prototypes Galore!

Several built, nothing stuck
There was a problem…

The Raw Materials

Figure 7. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seychelles88/ CC By-SA-NC 2.0

Public Domain…YES?

Figure 8. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/albaum/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

No

Figure 9. Lots of copyrighted material mixed in with public domain

Other Barriers to Use and Discovery

Figure 10. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/julochka/ CC BY-NC 2.0

Other Barriers, Con’t

Dense
Written by appellate court judges
Several topics covered per case

No Open Taxonomy

Figure 11. Source: http://lawschool.westlaw.com/shared/marketinfodisplay.asp?code=WW&id=16 Key number PPT

Means no way of finding which cases you would want.

Our Solution

Figure 12. Casebooks

Table of Contents Surveys

Figure 13. Source: http://griffinlawandreligion.com

Just for general topic - not specific sub-topic

And we still needed cases…

Fastcase to the rescue
Processing for matching to topics, tagging meta data and more
Stored in db, search engine

The Current Bookstore

Figure 14. The eLangdell Bookstore http://elangdell.cali.org/

Breadcrumb our People to Open

Figure 15. Currently over 30 titles

Future of eLangdell

Fulfilling the promise
Begin with topics, gather materials
Output materials that students can use

About this presentaiton

On Github at https://github.com/emasters/eLangdell-OpenEd-2013
- you can use the issue queue to ask questions, request more information
View the slides and more at http://emasters.github.io/eLangdell-OpenEd-2013/

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