Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Law Students Use Digital Note-Taking Program to Develop Law Practice Skills
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Education
Customer Profile
Provo, Utah–based Brigham Young University (BYU) has approximately 30,000 students, of which 450 attend the J. Reuben Clark School of Law.
Business Situation
Students and professors at the law school needed an efficient way to capture students’ performances on in-class exercises for analysis and feedback.
Solution
Students use the recording features of Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2003 to capture audio and video for in-class exercises on their laptops.
Benefits
n Faster and more efficient skills training
n Increased ownership and accountability
n Improved productivity and collaboration
n Reduced usage of more expensive resources / “It would have been impossible to accomplish what we did without the combination of OneNote and SharePoint. The ability to capture class exercises in real time and easily provide students with feedback opens up a whole new dimension in skills training.”
Gerald Williams, Professor, Brigham Young University
In the past, professors who teach negotiation and legal counseling skills at the Brigham Young University (BYU) law school did not have a good way to provide students with feedback on in-class exercises—a critical part of helping students to learn. Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2003 enables students to record audio and video for in-class exercises on their laptops, analyze their performance, and collaborate with professors to refine their skills. Professors are seeing benefits through the use of OneNote, including greater insight and efficiency when grading class exercises, an improved ability to manage information, and better tools for organizing seminars and other events.
Situation
Established in 1875, Brigham Young University (BYU) seeks to develop students of faith, intellect, and character—individuals with the skills and the desire to continue learning and to serve others throughout their lives. BYU is known for its academically oriented student body, world-class faculty, and devotion to combining scholarship with the ideals and principles of its sponsor, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Approximately 450 students at BYU attend the J. Reuben Clark School of Law. Like the rest of BYU, the law school relies on technology to help improve the quality of education. In mid-2003, BYU law school professors Larry Farmer and Gerald Williams began to investigate how IT could help improve teaching in their respective classes: Legal Interviewing and Counseling, and Legal Negotiation and Settlement. Specifically, Farmer and Williams wanted to improve the feedback process for the in-class exercises that they use to help students develop cognitive and interpersonal skills.
With 25 to 75 students per course, personally monitoring the dozens of pairs of students as they practiced each exercise in class was impossible. Instead, students were asked to recall those exercises after-the-fact, documenting what they could remember in written journals and other forms of post-exercise critique. After doing so and critiquing their own performances, the students submitted their written evaluations for professors to review and comment on. Neither party had a complete and accurate record of the exercise from which to work. Also, the quality of those exercises was compromised because the students had to concurrently evaluate and remember what happened during the exercises instead of just focusing on the task of applying the skills they were attempting to learn.
Interviewing and negotiation exercises also were captured outside of class a few times per semester, but the process was much more complex and resource-intensive. Students had to coordinate schedules, sign up for time in the law school’s multimedia lab, check out equipment on which to view the videotapes, schedule time to review them with a professor or teaching assistant, and so on.
Solution
Farmer and Williams found the ideal solution with Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2003, a digital note-taking program. When used in combination with inexpensive Web cameras that are made available in the classroom, the audio and video recording features of OneNote enable students to easily capture their performance in class exercises, review those performances, and deliver a digital copy of the video to professors or teaching assistants for feedback.
“OneNote allows us to capture and review students’ performances in class exercises with significant time and cost savings,” says Farmer. “It reduces all of the complexity of recording students on video to essentially two mouse clicks: Record and Stop.”
After class, students review the video and analyze their performance. When finished, students post their analysis and the Microsoft Windows Media® Player file to a Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services document workspace on the law school’s intranet, which runs on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and which the professors administer themselves. Then professors Farmer and Williams view the files and add their observations and feedback to the analysis done by each student.
From start to finish, no others are involved in the process—just student and teacher. “It would have been impossible to accomplish what we did without the combination of OneNote and SharePoint,” says Williams. “The ability to capture class exercises in real time and easily provide students with feedback opens up a whole new dimension in skills training. Our new solution may be simple, but it’s also remarkably powerful.”
Eric Widmar, a third-year law student in Farmer’s interviewing class adds, “The video recording features of OneNote are incredibly useful. It’s hard to perform and evaluate yourself at the same time, yet it’s amazing how the same mistakes will jump out at you when viewed in retrospect. Even simple things like distracting behaviors become easier to catch and correct. The video recording capabilities provided by OneNote are something that I’d like to keep in my toolkit after law school, as a way to capture more information when interviewing clients.”
Many Uses
Although the use of OneNote is not required for anything other than the recording of class exercises, students like Widmar have adopted it more broadly. Widmar uses OneNote for note taking in all of his classes. As he types, he applies OneNote note flags to the text, using different note flag types and colors to mark various kinds of legal concepts: case law, legal rulings, reasoning of the court, and other important legal decisions. When time comes to study, he generates a note flags summary (see Figure 3) and uses that information as a study guide. In addition, he can find information on any topic by using the built-in search features of OneNote.
“With OneNote, I can stay organized as I type the information,” says Widmar. “I don’t need to divert my attention from the lecture, nor do I need to come back and reorganize my notes at a later time. And when the time comes to study, the note flags summaries in OneNote provide an instant list of what I need to learn.”
Samuel Eghan, a student in Williams’s negotiation class, also is finding OneNote to be useful for more than just the recording of in-class exercises. He replaced a stack of paper notebooks with OneNote, which he now uses to take notes in all of his classes.
“I have OneNote running whenever I’m studying; it’s easy to drag content from a Web site or other source of information onto a OneNote page—or to send information from OneNote to Microsoft Word when writing a paper,” says Eghan. “I can also share my notes with study partners by e-mailing them from within OneNote.”
Not Just for Students
OneNote is proving equally as useful to the two professors. Williams uses the program to organize class information, breaking it down into OneNote sections and pages on course outlines, lecture notes, class assignments, and other information.
Farmer has found additional uses for OneNote, including the management of large projects such as the worldwide conference for legal educators that he recently helped to organize. He created a page in his OneNote Notebook for each of the many conference invitees, using that space to capture their contact information, information retrieved from various Web sites, and all e-mail correspondence. When the time came to identify attendees based on the topics they might be interested in, he used the OneNote search feature to easily sort through all of the information he had captured. He also used OneNote to manage the conference program, track tasks and administrative details, and take meeting notes.
Now Farmer is working on yet another use for OneNote: analyzing in-class group activities. He is using Web cameras and the video recording features of OneNote to concurrently capture team discussions that take place in class during collaborative learning exercises. Farmer is able to later review in his office the video of each team’s interaction to evaluate team dynamics.
Future Plans
Software developers at BYU are building tools for analyzing the video captured by OneNote. Features will include the ability to add metadata, flag types of behaviors, and so on. In addition, Farmer and Williams are sharing their success with OneNote and the way it is changing the classroom and learning environment with other educators. They recently presented together on this topic at two conferences—with two more planned—and already have received a number of follow-up requests from professors at other schools who are interested in developing solutions similar to that used at BYU.
The law school also is expanding its use of SharePoint technology as a way for students in legal writing classes and on externships to submit assignments and status reports for faculty to review and comment. The use of SharePoint technology in this way is expected to eliminate as much as half of an administrator’s workload, much in the same way that it allows Farmer and Williams to collaborate with students without the involvement of others.
Benefits
The use of Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 at BYU law school is yielding strong results—benefits that extend past closing the feedback loop for in-class exercises. Through its ease of use and unique feature set, OneNote is helping students and faculty at the J. Reuben Clark School of Law to better collaborate on skills development, more effectively capture and manage information, increase personal productivity, and free limited law school resources for other uses.
In a Microsoft-commissioned survey of students in professor Farmer's and Williams's classes, 81 percent of the respondents said that OneNote made their note taking more productive and 75 percent said that it saved time. Three-quarters of the students who responded to the survey plan to continue using OneNote in the future.
Faster and More Efficient Skills Training
By facilitating the capture of in-class exercises on video for later analysis, OneNote is helping students to learn new skills faster and more effectively. Students can concentrate fully on applying those skills during class exercises instead of devoting part of their attention to remembering what happened. In addition, they can see things in their performances that would likely have gone undetected had they been forced to reconstruct the exercise from memory.
"It was exhilarating to grade this past semester’s journals because they were so far superior to any journals I have seen in the past,” says Williams. “The quality of journal entries increased at least ten-fold: they became specific, accurate, and verifiable. With the help of video notes, students were much more self-critical and could easily see how they could have done better."
Increased Ownership and Accountability
Both professors say that the recording of class exercises has dramatically increased student involvement in those activities because students know that their performances now will be reviewed and evaluated. In addition, the capture of class exercises on video gives Farmer and Williams the information they need to accurately assess each student’s proficiency and ensure that passing grades are only given to those who deserve them (the practicum for Professor Farmer’s in-class exercises is graded pass/fail).
“Seeing themselves on video gives students a different mindset—they’re more serious and thoughtful now that they know we are able to review and evaluate them,” says Farmer. “In the past, it was hard to tell if a student had mastered the skills we’re teaching. Today, we can monitor skills development more closely and require every student to demonstrate competency.”
Improved Productivity and Collaboration
OneNote is helping both students and professors improve productivity. In the past, for the few exercises that were captured on videotape, each student’s performance used to take Williams an hour to watch in full and then provide his feedback. Today, he can review a student’s performance on a class exercise and provide feedback in 20 to 30 minutes.
Student Widmar reports improvements in personal study methods that are just as significant. In the past, when preparing for an exam, he would reread his class notes and pull important information into a study guide before starting to memorize the required material. Thanks to OneNote and its note flag summaries, that preparation step is no longer required.
“Before OneNote, my rule of thumb was to devote 60 hours to prepare for each final,” says Widmar. “Of that, I spent half my time organizing and the other half learning. Today, with OneNote, I can literally hit one button to create a study guide and immediately begin to memorize the material. The effort it takes to prepare for an exam is cut in half, and the remaining time that I do spend is more productive.”
OneNote also makes it easier for Widmar to collaborate with other students. He provides a copy of his OneNote notes to his study partner using the e-mail features of OneNote. OneNote also helps students collaborate with others on in-class exercises because they now can share videos with each other as e-mail attachments instead of duplicating a videotape.
Reduced Usage of School Resources
OneNote is helping the law school conserve precious resources by freeing time in its multimedia lab for other uses. In Farmer’s class alone, the 15 skills exercises recorded by his 25 students would have taken about 375 hours of media lab time, monopolizing that resource for 9 weeks out of a 14-week semester and requiring U.S.$4,500 in salary for the student employees who staff the lab (calculated at an average rate of $12 per hour). In Williams’s class, the five negotiation exercises recorded by his 42 students last semester would have taken more than 200 hours of media lab time, tying up the lab for the remaining five weeks of the semester and costing $2,400 in staff time.