Last Thursday evening, the University of Denver announced it would be closed on Friday, February 3. A massive snow storm was coming in overnight, and indeed it was not a false alarm. In the morning, the roads were treacherous, and it snowed all day Friday and into the night. When it finally cleared on Saturday, we had two feet of snow in our front yard.
One of my colleagues once said about the frequency of University closings: "It usually takes a direct hit by an asteroid." Meaning, it never happens. But the University was right to close.
But why also cancel classes? We have to make them up at some point, and that can extend the semester too late. And with "integrated" law school skills classes - like the Discovery Practicum course I teach - it is very disruptive to postpone a class. It is not like a typical "doctrinal" course, where each class is essentially the same - going through cases in a casebook. Skipping one class just doubles up material in another, or adds a class to the end of the semester, or the end of semester material is skipped or compressed. It doesn't much matter to most law school courses. But it does matter to the Discovery class I teach.
So I conducted class online on Friday. The technology to support this is in place in almost every class: Blackboard, or a similar courseware system. I wrote to my students on Thursday evening to let them know that I would like to conduct class online the following day. To their credit, they seemed willing to go along with this - I was clear that I was not requiring them to participate, since the University was closed, and if they would rather go sledding, they could certainly do that. I prepared the class in the morning, and conducted it in the Lexis Webcourse site (basically, Blackboard) that comes with the textbook for the course (Discovery Practice, described elsewhere in this blog).
Like most classes, there was advance reading in the text and online, as well as a pre-class quiz (online) about the reading. I prepared a PowerPoint that went through the doctrinal material for the course (our subject was Answering Interrogatories), and then set up several discussion threads. The PPT made reference to those threads in several places, and it was there that we had the class discussion. The class extended the full class period - actually, it started before 1:30, and ended after 4:00 p.m., which is the usual class period (since we only meet once per week). I followed the discussion threads as they developed over the course of the class, and asked questions and added my guidance when it seemed helpful. At the end of the class, there were 110 postings made to seven threaded discussions over the course of 2.5 hours.
All but two of my students were able to attend the class, and they will be able to catch up - asynchronously - over the next few days when it is convenient for them. And, we all stayed safe and warm. Even better, last night I received an email from one of the students in the course, which read as follows: "I just wanted to say that I was initially apprehensive about the online idea but I am pleasantly surprised and impressed with how it turned out. Thanks for exposing a law school class to the new era!"
It was really simple to do, with technology that has been available to us for many years. What teacher today doesn't know how to use PowerPoint, an online courseware site to upload a file, and participate in online discussions? Sure, I worked all day when it might have been nice to enjoy the unexpected day off. But given this type of class, it was much better to conduct class online and stay on track.
It is perfectly appropriate to close the University when it is unsafe to travel, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that it has become an anachronism to cancel classes.
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