Creating an Online Bar Support Program

AuthorSara J. Berman
ProfessionConcord's Assistant Dean of Bar Support Programs and is also the Assistant Dean of Academic Support and Bar Support at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, California
Pages53-62
53
6
CREATING AN ONLINE
BAR SUPPORT PROGRAM
I am not giving tech advice here or telling you how to set up a system; rather, I am
sharing some of the various tools and techniques that can be eective in online bar
support. I am extremely grateful to my colleague Craig Gold of LegalEdTech.org for
helping me make the best use of today’s online classroom technologies.
wHY ONlINE fOR BAR SuPPORT
Bar support courses and/or extracurricular bar support workshops can be taught in
part or wholly online. (Classes that are partially online are sometimes called “blended”
or “hybrid” learning models.) You can supplement live courses with online content,
mentoring, and support. You can provide certain specic information online, some-
times called “ipping” the classroom, to leave in-class time for active learning and
group exercises.
Deciding what parts of a course to put online and what to conduct live is a fasci-
nating topic and could be a chapter or even a book of its own. Some people choose to
put more objective, factual information online. Some choose to put complex concepts
online so students can review them more than once; others opt for putting simpler
points online and saving more subtle areas for in-class discussion. As examples, in the
sample syllabus discussed in Chapter 5, I noted a few areas I thought would be good
to put online to save time for in-class writing and/or group work.
Online bar support is particularly helpful as a way of providing assistance to strug-
gling and at-risk students in a way that does not stigmatize. (ey can get extra help
without their peers “seeing” that they are asking for that help.) Other reasons online
learning is well suited to bar support:
PTB Teachers-Final_131104.indd 53 11/4/13 2:33 PM

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