Resources for CALI Representatives

Updated 7/28/2008

1. What is the purpose of this website?
2. Why spread the word about CALI Lessons?
3. What else should students, faculty, and staff at my school know about CALI?
4. What can I do to help?
5. How do I spread the word about CALI to students?
6. How do I spread the word about CALI to faculty?
7. Who do I contact with ideas about how to spread the word about CALI?

What is the purpose of this website?
CALI hopes to create a resource to help CALI reps and contacts easily spread the word about CALI's services to students and faculty on their campuses.

Why spread the word about CALI Lessons?
CALI Lessons are an important learning and teaching resource that students and faculty of CALI member schools have available for free as a part of their schools membership.

You would be surprised at how many students don't even know what CALI lessons are, let alone that CALI lessons are free for them. So it is important to make sure your students know about CALI as a learning tool.

Many faculty members have never even looked at CALI Lessons at all. Some made judgments about CALI's materials years ago and haven't looked at them since. Either way, faculty should at least be aware of CALI lessons as a tool used hundreds of thousands of times by students each year.

Additionally, spreading the word about CALI helps your school get the most out of its CALI membership. Taking a little bit of time and resources to spread the word about CALI within your school helps ensure that our current offerings are being used at your school.

What else should students, faculty, and staff at my school know about CALI?
We have a number of exciting projects that both students and faculty will use and benefit from. Many of these projects can be found at our CALI Beta Pages. CALI reps and contacts need to do their part in educating the rest of the students, staff, and faculty about new offerings from CALI.

What can I do to help spread the word?
This website is simply about finding simple, easy, and inexpensive things that you can do to make sure your students and faculty are fully aware of CALI and its services.

Anything that you have time to do that helps spread the word about CALI helps. Handing out information and DVD's as well as explaining CALI and CALI lessons during 1L orientation or in the first weeks of 1L classes is crucial.

Other things that help are simple things like sending reminders about CALI via email or school newsletter one or two times during the semester, informing faculty of new lessons in their area, informing faculty and students of new services and projects, handing out the CD's and business cards, or printing and handing out some of the promotional information that will be housed on this website.

How do I spread the word about CALI to students?
There are two ways to promote CALI. 1) Directly to the student and 2) and through the faculty.

Some students don't even know about CALI and CALI lessons as a learning tool. Just communicating what CALI lessons are and giving students the authorization code is the key. Mentioning CALI and handing out DVD's at orientation or during the first weeks of school for 1L's is the crucial first step.

Some schools will require legal writing profs take a few minutes at the beginning of the semester to go through signing up at www.cali.org. This is during the same time that the students are learning about legal resources like Lexis and West. Preferably, the legal writing profs would hand out the CALI access code and require their students to sign up.

Additionally, you may wish to suggest or require legal writing profs assign one or two of the legal writing lessons (the basic grammar lesson or one of the citation format lessons would be good). This makes sure students are comfortable with CALI Lessons and it requires students to get their authorization code and create a CALI account..

It's also a good idea to send follow up reminders to students through email and/or campus bulletin or announcements throughout the semester. I would suggest at least two a semester. The first early on in the semester to remind them that they need to contact their CALI rep or contact to get an access code to the website and to direct them toward that contact person on your campus. And a second reminder should be sent towards the end of the semester as tests are getting close in order to remind them to sign up online for CALI and remind that CALI lessons are helpful in review for tests.

How do I spread the word about CALI to faculty?The goal with faculty is to get them to work through lessons for the class subject they are teaching and then either 1) suggest CALI in general, 2) suggest a specific CALI lesson, or 3) to assign a specific CALI lesson they particularly like.

Letters in faculty mailboxes or emails can help to point them toward CALI and CALI lessons. If possible, mentioning/discussing at a faculty meeting is helpful. Sometimes one of our staff are even willing to come and speak to faculty about CALI, depending on our schedules.

Faculty have access to the CALI Author software that allows them to make their own lessons. This is pertinent in that we are always interested in acquiring more lessons should a professor wish to propose authoring a CALI lesson for us on a certain topic.

Besides the lessons, faculty should be aware of CALI's other projects. So keep your eyes and ears open for new CALI news at it becomes available. As an example, they may be interested in our recent Legal Education Podcasting Pproject found here at www.classcaster.org. In addition, our CALI Beta page has a listing of a number of our new projects that they may be interested in trying out.

Who do I contact with ideas about how to spread the word about CALI?
We're always open to new ideas about how to promote CALI. If you have any ideas or methods that you believe are successful at your school please contact agroothuis@cali.org.

Updated 7/28/2008

We recommend sending out a simple email, letter, or announcement to all students about CALI lessons within the first week or two of the beginning of each semester.

Feel free to use, add, or edit the text below. Don't forget to add your school's authorization code at the bottom!

(Copy and paste the text below):

As you are starting your new classes, we’d like to remind you about a study tool that is available to you at no cost: CALI lessons.

If you are unfamiliar, CALI lessons are interactive, computer-based tutorials provided by the non-profit Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (www.cali.org). Lessons are provided to you as a law student because our school is a CALI member school.

If you're having trouble with certain concept or just feel you need to reinforce what you've learned in class, there is probably a CALI lesson for you on the topic. There are over 700 lessons available to help you study 33 different legal subject areas at www.cali.org. So the lessons are great for mastering material throughout the semester.

When registering a new account at cali.org, you must use our school’s authorization code to create the account. The authorization code is: (PUT AUTHORIZATION CODE HERE UNLESS POSTED ON PUBLIC WEBSITE...IF ON PUBLIC WEBSITE JUST LINK TO www.cali.org/contacts).

You only need to use this authorization code once. After that, you may use the email/password you used to sign up in order to login at cali.org.

Good luck with the rest of the semester!

Updated 7/28/08

We recommend sending out a simple email, letter, or announcement to all students about CALI lessons a few weeks before finals. This will remind students that CALI Lessons are freely available as they prepare for finals.

Feel free to use the text below any way you like. Don't forget to add your school's authorization code at the bottom!

(Copy and paste the text below):

With finals approaching, don't forget that CALI lessons provide a free way to help you prepare for exams!

If you're unfamiliar, CALI lessons are interactive, computer-based tutorials distributed by the non-profit Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI, www.cali.org).

CALI publishes over 700 CALI lessons in 33 different legal subject areas, listed at cali.org/lessons. All law students at CALI member schools, including ours, have free, unlimited access to CALI lessons. Law students around the country ran CALI lessons over 900,000 times last school year.

If you are registering a free account at cali.org for the first time, note that you must use our school's authorization code to create a new account on www.cali.org. Our schools authorization code is (PUT AUTHORIZATION CODE HERE UNLESS POSTING TO PUBLIC WEBSITE, THEN JUST LINK TO www.cali.org/contacts).

Good luck with finals!

A printout for faculty. Lists and describes the different CALI features and resources that faculty will find useful.

Files:

FacultyResources.pdf

Handout contains information on Legal Education Podcasting Project and podcasting classes for students.

Files:

StudentPodcasting.pdf

This printout contains basic information about CALI lessons for students who are not familiar with CALI lessons.

If you are downloading Word or Publisher versions don't forget to download CALI font and to manually add your school's authorization code.

Files:

UsingCALILessons(pdf).pdf

UsingCALILessons(Word).doc (customizable, needs CALI font)

UsingCALILEssons(Pub).pub (customizable, needs CALI font)

This handout includes a list of lesson subjects and quick instructions for accessing CALI lessons.

Files:

StudentAccess.pdf

This link includes CALI's traditional handouts with lists of lessons broken down into each legal subject area.

The "Descriptions" links for each subject area are longer catalogue-like printouts with descriptions of each leasson...

whereas the "Flyer" links are one page handouts...

There are also links to Faculty Resources, Student Access Information, and New Lessons handouts.

Here is the link.

Updated 7/29/2008

Use this every once in awhile to remind faculty that CALI lesson are available to them as a teaching tool and that we are always adding new lessons.

Feel free to use this any way you would like. Remember to add the authorization code!

Text (Copy and paste):

If you have not looked at CALI lessons in awhile you should visit www.cali.org and take a look. CALI, a nonprofit consortium of law schools to which we belong, hosts 600+ faculty-authored lessons in 32 legal subject areas at www.cali.org.

CALI continually adds new lessons to the library with fellowships in different legal areas, most recently Criminal Procedure.

Student usage and faculty adoption of lessons continue to steadily rise each year because this generation of students respond well to the interactive/computer element of the lessons.

Law professors are discovering that the interactive lessons on narrow areas of law can be powerful teaching tools. Many law professors suggest or assign CALI lessons they think will be particularly helpful to their students.

Feel free to visit www.cali.org and work through some of the lessons. If registering a CALI username and password for the first time, you will need the school's faculty authorization code: (AUTHORIZATION CODE HERE).

If you don't see a lesson in the area you are looking for, CALI is always looking for quality lesson authors. If you have questions about authoring your own lesson, contact Deb Quentel (dquentel@cali.org) for more details.

You'll need to download this font file to your computer in order for some of the downloadable files on this to look correct.

Upon downloading you will be able to type and adjust the CALI in the above style as any other font. Note that only C, A, L, I, and R (creates the registered trademark symbol) will work when this font is selected.

Instructions:

1. Download the CALI Font file
2. Copy and place the downloaded CALI font file in your computer's font folder (probably found at C:Windows/Fonts)

CALIFont.TTF

A PowerPoint slide presentation to be shown to new law students. This short presentation will 1) introduce CALI and CALI lessons, 2) teach students how to create a new CALI account using the student authorization code, and 3) teach students how to access CALI Lessons.

You can find the original powerpoint file here to create your own presentation or add your own narration...

or watch the YouTube video version, complete with audio, as seen above.

Updated 8/27/2008

This website is set up for CALI representatives, contacts, and others who wish to spread the word to students and others on campus about CALI.

Here you will find links to various downloadable/printable files along with suggestions for how to use the files.

If you have any ideas for files or if you would like to see a file in a different format than what is available her, let us know!

Follow these links to find these files and resources:

Basic Suggestions: Posted Below (READ THIS FIRST!)

CALI Powerpoint Presentations

Form Letters/Emails/Announcments

Handouts/Flyers

CALI Font Download

CALI Press Releases

Authorization Code Cards

CALI Merchandise (outside link to cafepress.com)

CALI Announcements and News (Subscribe to Announcement and News RSS feed here)

Updated July 29, 2008

We suggest five easy steps you can follow throughout the semester to help make sure students know about CALI lessons: 1) Introduce lessons to 1L's, 2) an early fall semester reminder to all students, 3) a late fall semester reminder before exams, 4) an early spring reminder, and 5) a late spring reminder.

You may find you need to do more (take a look at our other files), but taking these basic steps, amounting to five simple reminders sent out to students, should help raise awareness of CALI lessons as one of the few free tools that law students have available.

FALL SEMESTER

1) Introduce CALI lessons to 1L's through (a) orientation and/or (b) classroom contact

Purpose:
-Introduce 1L's to CALI lessons for the first time.

Suggestions/files:
- Handout authorization code business cards (CALI may send a batch to your school) to all 1L's during either orientation or a legal writing classes
- Hand out DVD's to ALL 1L's either 1) in orientation during tour of library/computer facilities or during library/IT speaker or 2) In class time by library/tech representatives during librarly/research training.
- Have the person handing out DVD's to 1L's give a quick explanation of CALI lessons to students.
- Classroom: Require 1L's in legal writing to signup to www.cali.org and complete a basic lesson (like the lessons on Citations or Grammar Basics)

2) Early semester reminder to all students (2-3 weeks after orientation)

Suggested Language:
HERE

Purpose:
- Explain what CALI lessons are and give possible uses
- Remind all students (including 1L's after the overload of orientation) that lessons are free to them and that they need to use authorization code to create account at cali.org.

Other Suggestions/Files
- Send out an email or form letter and/or
- Place an announcement in campuswide news bulletin/announcments
- Hand out authorization code cards
- Hand out DVD's
- Place extra DVD's in library/computer lab

3) Late semester reminder for all students (1-2 weeks before finals)

Suggested Language:
HERE

Purpose:
Remind students about CALI lessons before exams, tell them they are a good study tool for exams.

Suggestions/Files:
- Send out an email or form letter and/or
- Place an announcement in campuswide news bulletin/announcments

SPRING SEMESTER:

4) Early semester reminder to all students (2-3 weeks after start of semester)

Suggested Language:
HERE

Purpose:
- Explain what CALI lessons are and give possible uses
- Remind all students (including 1L's after the overload of orientation) that lessons are free to them and that they need to get authorization code.

Other Suggestions/Files
- Send out an email or form letter and/or
- Place an announcement in campuswide news bulletin/announcments

5) Late semester reminder for all students (1-2 weeks before final exams)

Suggested Language:
HERE

Purpose:
Remind students about CALI lessons before exams, tell them they are a good study tool for exams.

Other Suggestions/Files:
- Send out an email or form letter and/or
- Place an announcement in campuswide news bulletin/announcments