Teaching

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What remains when the intoxicating distractions of life are removed?

Albert Camus in The Plague (1947) engages this question, and nearly 70 years later, so does Doctor Paul Kalanithi in When Breath Becomes Air (2016).

I read both of these books on vacation at Ocean Isle, NC late last month; this was not exactly light, uplifting beach reading.

Before the plague engulfed the Algerian coastal town of Oran, Camus’ narrator notes that:

Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, “doing business.” Naturally they don’t eschew such simpler pleasure as love-making, sea bathing, going to the pictures. But, very sensibly they reserve these past times for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible . . . . Nevertheless there still exist towns and countries where people have now and then an inkling of something different. In general it doesn’t change their lives. Still they have had an intimation, and that’s so much to the good. Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations; in other words,

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It seems that every day, more schools are announcing that they will re-open either totally or mostly online in the Fall. If you’re still debating whether opening face-to-face in the Fall is safe, I recommend that you read this compelling essay by my colleague, Bill Widen. I live in a COVID hotspot in Miami, Florida, and fortunately, I had already been assigned to teach online. Unlike many of you who may find out about your school’s plans at the end of July, I’ve already been focusing on upping my online game.

Last week, in Part II of this series, I promised to summarize what I have learned from some of my readings from  Learning How to Learn, Small Teaching Online, and Online Learning and the Future of Legal Education. Alas, I haven’t even had time to look at them because I’ve been teaching two courses, watching webinars on teaching, and taking two online courses for my own non-legal certifications. But it wasn’t a waste of time because it allowed me to look at online learning from a student’s perspective. Next week, I’ll summarize the readings in the sources listed above, but this week, I’ll provide…

Last week, I wrote the first in a series of posts with tips for teaching online. I expect many more law schools to join Harvard and now UC Berkeley by doing all Fall classes online. I’m already teaching online this summer and will teach online in the fall. Our students deserve the best, so I’m spending my summer on webinars from my home institution and others learning best practices in course design.

Here are some tips that I learned this week from our distance learning experts. First, I need to adopt backward design. I have to  identify the learning objectives for my courses, then decide how I will assess whether or not students successfully met the learning objective. Effective learning objectives are active, measurable, and focus on different levels of learning (e.g., remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating). Some people find Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives helpful.

Once I figure out my learning objectives, I will work backwards to determine what kinds of activities the students will work on either online or face to face (which for me will be Zoom). For more on this topic, see this guide to backward design from Vanderbilt University Center for …

Thanks to all of our readers who were able to come to the National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) last Thursday and Friday.  It was lovely to see so many of you there, even though it was somewhat sad that we could not be with each other in person.  The conference enjoyed record participation, and we have received a lot of useful informal feedback about our virtual format from folks who attended.

I was the beneficiary of many “teaching moments” in hosting and participating in the NBLSC this year.  I later will post on some of the outtakes from the NBLSC teaching panel (to which co-blogger Marcia Narine Weldon–who blogged about teaching on Friday–contributed meaningfully).  Today, however, I am focusing my post on a few new things my fellow UT Law conference hosts and I learned about Zoom in the process of hosting the conference.  A list follows.  

  • Although meeting participants should mute themselves on entering a meeting, it is best for a meeting host to set up the meeting so that all participants will be muted on entry, especially for large meetings.  It can be challenging to track down and mute participants who join a meeting and bring

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If you’re like me, you’re wondering how you can improve your teaching after last Spring’s foray into online learning. I wasn’t nearly as traumatized as many of my colleagues because I had already taught Transactional Drafting online asynchronously for several semesters. This summer, I’m teaching two courses — Transactional Drafting asynchronously and a hybrid course on Regulatory Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability. I’m making a list of tips based on my experience and will post about that in the future. In the meantime, I’ve started to think about how I can improve next semester when I will be teaching all of my courses online. Since I know that so many students had a mediocre to poor experience with emergency online teaching, I’ve spent a lot of time on webinars learning how to do better. This will be the first in a series of posts on what I’m learning on course design, learning styles, and best practices. But let’s start with the basic questions to ask yourself as you’re preparing for next semester.

First, think about whether you want to teach synchronously or not. If you’re looking for maximum flexibility for both you and the students, then asynchronous teaching makes sense.

I am teaching Business Associations this summer, and I am excited to get back in the classroom. Well, I was. Instead, I am teaching in virtual class room via Zoom.  I am still glad to be interacting with students in a teaching capacity, but I sure miss the classroom setting. I am glad, though, to have this experience so I am closer to what this has been like for our students and faculty.  I still have the benefit of my colleagues experiences, students who have been in the online learning environment, and a little time to plan, so it’s better for me than it was for everyone in March. Still, there is quite a learning curve on all of this. 

Over the past several years, I have asked students to create a fictional limited liability company (LLC) for our first class.  It does a number of things. To begin, it connects them with a whole host of decisions businesses must make in choosing their entity form.  It also introduces them to the use of forms and how that works.  I always give them an old version of the form. This year, I used 2017 Articles of Organization for a West…

After finishing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, I devoured Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Published in 1985, Postman’s thesis is that Huxley in Brave New World, not George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984, more accurately predicted life in the modern United States. In the forward to his book, Postman writes:

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history, As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth

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In two earlier posts (here and here), I addressed a number of issues and tips related to the emergency remote online teaching that became the norm for most of us in the law academy back in March.  I finished my “classroom teaching” for the semester two weeks ago.  My online timed exam was given last week.  My take-home project in another class is due this week.  I survived; the students survived.  That may be the best I can say for all that. 

However, a larger, long-term issue looms in the background relating to the online teaching we did–and may continue to do–as a result of COVID-19.  That issue?  Whether our current remote teaching will catalyze a movement in higher education, including legal education, to teach more classes online.  If university and law school budgets continue to contract, administrators may see cost-savings in moving more courses online.

This issue has engendered much debate among educators generally.  I bring it to the fore here for consideration in the business law teaching context.  I have mixed feelings about moving clinical, simulation, and standard doctrinal business law courses online. The reasons vary from course to course.  And there is no doubt much…

This post again comes to us from friend-of-the BLPB Nadia B. Ahmad.  Her offering is in the tradition of similar posts published by my co-bloggers in the past that focus on videos that can be used in teaching various topics relevant to business law.  I remember this post, for example, by Marcia Narine Weldon on blockchain teaching resources.  Again, thanks to Nadia for contributing to our knowledge and our blog.  I hope that others will be encouraged to offer suggestions in the comments below about other helpful online video resources that they know about.

image from cdnimages.barry.edu

Below is a list of online video resources for business law related topics.

  1. Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis(1 hour, 35 minutes)

VICE on HBO looks at factors that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the efforts made by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Timothy Geithner, and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke to save the United States from an economic collapse. The feature-length documentary explores the challenges these men faced, as well as the consequences of their decisions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QozGSS7QY_U

  1. To Catch a Trader

PBS Frontline correspondent Martin Smith goes inside the government’s ongoing…

Please note the following regarding the postponement of the biennial conference at Emory law, previously posted and promoted on the BLPB here:

Due to the uncertain length of the COVID-19 global pandemic, and out of an abundance of caution, we have decided to cancel the Transactional Law and Skills Education Conference currently scheduled for June 5-6, 2020. 

We will re-schedule the Conference and revisit our theme – “Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight: Transactional Law and Skills Education in the 2020s” – when it is appropriate and safe to do so.

If you have already registered for the Conference, we will refund your money.  If you have submitted a proposal or a nomination for the Tina L. Stark Award for Teaching Excellence, you will have the opportunity to resubmit your proposal or nomination when we establish the new Conference date. 

If you have already reserved a room at the Emory Conference Center Hotel please call them at 800.933.6679 to cancel your reservation.  For other Conference-related questions, please contact our Conference Coordinator, Kelli Pittman at kelli.pittman@emory.edu.

During this period of “social distancing,” we are proud to be members of a community of transactional law and skills educators dedicated to excellence.  We look

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