Open Teaching:

"Wait, this isn't Open Teaching!" may be your initial reaction to the idea presented in the post below. Consider, however, that the underlying principles of openess (e.g. accessibility, innovative expansion beyond the four walls of the classroom) are portrayed in a nascent state. In other words, this is an initial step into the world of open teaching.

Frantic teachers confront me with legal questions, wondering whether they will face a lawsuit in the near future. I feel especially attentive because I come from a family of teachers. They teach at every level of public and private education, and they and those confronting me with questions face certain common legal concerns. The most common issues seem to relate to the following: injuries on school property, sexual harassment allegations, discrimination, the legal bounds of discipline, searches and seizures, use of copyrighted materials, and the phenomenon of texting pictures that legally qualify as child pornography.

I would enjoy teaching a course for secondary education teachers in the McKay School of Education and administrators in the EDLF program that would supply them with practical information that they will, unfortunately, be using in the near future. The question I have, based on today’s lecture, is how can I make this information available to the maximum number of people who would benefit from it? Further, how can I involve non-students in the course?

Here are a few ideas:

· While recording and posting lectures is one possibility, brief, on-point videos would likely be more effective. What if students (1) created scripts for on-point videos on each major legal topic; (2) recorded amateur video and posted on Digital Dialog http://digitaldialog.byu.edu/main.php?updates=0; (3) presented their videos in class; and (3) selected the best script for each topic and had the winning teams professionally produce their script in coordination with the production crew at CTL. The final day of class could be a “movie preview” and the official launch of the videos on a website and/or YouTube.

· I could further share the videos during Continuing Legal Education lectures and other events on hot topics in Education Law.

· While the primary target would be secondary education teachers, the administrators in our EDLF program would find ample opportunity to apply lessons learned from these video vignettes. We could certainly invite them to enroll in the course, to attend any lectures they found especially interesting, to comment on student videos shared on Digital Dialog, or to otherwise interact with me and the students on a formal or informal basis. What would likely be even more effective would be to have a lecture specifically on administrators at which current administrators presented the legal difficulties they faced and the solutions they had found. Responding to informed student questions may be the best teaching vehicle we could provide for them. In addition, it would provide my students an opportunity to network with future employers and look sympathetic and well-informed on issues the administrators face.