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December 29, 2011

Simon Fodden

Coursekit and Lawyers

Teaching and learning are pretty constant activities for legal professionals. Some of the learning — most, perhaps — takes place when you're alone, and the teaching when you're with one other person; and at the other end of the scale, a lot is now managed by professional societies, responsible for providing CPD to large groups. But there are also times when a course of instruction is needed for a group that falls somewhere in between the very small and the very large. It's with that middle-sized, ad hoc occasion that Coursekit might be helpful.

Post-secondary education makes fairly consistent use of online courseware nowadays, the two main products being Blackboard and Moodle, both quite sophisticated, not to say complex. Now Coursekit provides a third choice: it's open access software that's beautifully straightforward (and quite visually attractive), offering anyone who wishes to build a course the ability to do the essential online elements with ease — and have the data hosted on the Coursekit site, again for free. You'll find modules for online student discussion, sharing resources, calendaring, grading. and so forth.

As you might imagine with a courseware site, there's ample explanation of the software, the obligatory FAQ, and the opportunity to play with a demo version.

Even if you don't need to mount courses or formal lessons, you may find that this product can lend itself to becoming a decent, free collaborative tool for that project or problem-solving task.

Simon Fodden is the founder of Slaw. He taught law at Osgoode Hall Law School for more than 30 years before he retired to focus on writing, publishing, and IT and law.
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3 Comments on “Coursekit and Lawyers”

  1. Attorney George E. Bourguignon, Jr. says:
    December 29, 2011 at 8:50 pm

    Congrats on being named an honoree of the ABA Journal's top 100 law blogs for 2011!

  2. Anonymous says:
    December 30, 2011 at 4:22 am

    Hi Simon,

    You might also want to check out http://www.iversity.org
    Our product is quite similar to what Coursekit is building, but with a few twists. One of them is a feature called 'social reading' which allows you to collaborate around pdf documents, e.g. to highlight passages or to annotate them.
    iversity is free, so do give it a try and let us know what you think!

    Thanks

    Hannes

  3. Simon Fodden says:
    January 2, 2012 at 4:58 pm

    Readers interested in this might like to know that the NYTimes reported today on this software, leading with the fact that Coursekit just raised $5,000,000 to continue development of the application: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/coursekit-raises-5-million-to-reinvent-the-classroom/

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