Online Learning Project Shuttered

The AllLearn project, a consortium among Oxford, Stanford and Yale Universities to research online learning, has come to a close. We offered 110 online courses from Oxford, Stanford, and Yale Universities to over 10,000 participants from 70 countries during the past five years. As we looked to the future, the cost of offering top-quality enrichment courses at affordable prices was not sustainable over time.

AllLearn – Alliance for Lifelong Learning

Well, this is a bit sobering. One does wonder what the cause of the failure was.  Perhaps this market does not really exist. It is important to note that the consortium was offering enrichment courses, not credit courses or training per se.

 

L&C Launches Open Access Legal Scholarship Site

BoleyBlogs! » Open Access Legal Scholarship at Lewis & Clark- Paul L. Boley Law Library – This follows along after last year’s Open Access Law program.  One would hope that this may catch on, But I’m not sure the critical mass is there.  Law faculty are not so concerned about open acces to their scholarship, it seems to me.  Perhpas if there was an actual authoring platform that encouraged open Access to the materials being created, this would pick up steam.

 

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Would Langdell Have Been A CALI Author?

Good question.  I found this article which does a good job
of describing Christopher Columbus Langdell’s contribution to legal education in America.  I
thought this quote was particularly interesting:

"Langdell’s innovations initially met with enormous resistance. Many
students were outraged. During the first three years of his
administration, as word spread of Harvard’s new approach to legal
education, enrollment at the school dropped from 165 to 117 students,
leading Boston University to start a law school of its own. Alumni were
in open revolt."

It’s hard to imagine today someone changing the way law is taught to
such an extent that the school loses a third of its students, but they
stick with it until it becomes the standard.  In a way, I think, CALI is
heralding such a sea change, but instead of it being focused on a single
school, we spread the risk out across the entire consortium. Lessons,
Classcaster, and, soon, eLangdell, taken together represent a change
every bit as challenging and revolutionary as the introduction of the
case method except that the changes introduced by CALI will not take 40
years to become the standard.
 

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