Law On-Line:A Collaborative, Web-Based Journey in the Law and Social Sciences

During Spring 1998, we embarked on pedagogical journey into unknown terrains -- the terrains of collaborative teaching and World Wide Web instruction. In this paper we present a journey in progress, a joint University of Maryland and Towson University venture called A Law On-Line. Students worked in groups, with members drawn from each campus, and they were required to visit and contribute to the course chat room each week where they could approach the subject from a different angle and to debate it with their colleagues from the other university. Our students have rated the course highly on independently-generated surveys in both classes and have shared a number of legitimate concerns to which we responded in our second and third versions of the course in Spring 1999 and Spring 2000. Some logistics have been a bit tricky, but the experiment has proven quite successful. Part I is a brief overview of the literature on teaching that, along with our own horse sense gained from years of classroom experience, has informed our method. Part II is a review of our syllabus and the experiences that followed. Part III addresses lessons learned and future applications.