FAQ
Updated 7/28/2008
- What is the purpose of this website?
- Why spread the word about CALI Lessons?
- What else should students, faculty, and staff at my school know about CALI?
- What can I do to help?
- How do I spread the word about CALI to students?
- How do I spread the word about CALI to faculty?
- 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.
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