Principled and Structured Design of Electronic Materials for Learning the Law

Electronic legal education involves the use of information, communication and instructional technologies to enhance students learning of the law and to provide law teachers with environments and tools for teaching the law. Since the beginning of the Eighties these types of technologies were introduced in legal education at Law schools and faculties of Law. The first applications in this field were databanks of statutes and precedents; soon to be followed by computer assisted instructional programs. With the fast growth of the Internet many Law schools and Law faculties are moving their education and training into the web environment. The web environment enables a more integrated approach of using the technologies in legal education. It also enables teachers to assemble, store and (re) use materials for learning the law. Maybe even more important it may open new ways of teaching and learning the law, for example, by providing students with an environment in which they can manage legal information and legal knowledge for their personal professional use. Plenty of possibilities, however, to realize effective and efficient learning of the law existing electronic materials should be carefully (re)-used and integrated, where new electronic materials have to be designed. The way to realize this is by taking a principled and structured design approach. This indicates that the design of electronic materials for learning the law has to be defined as research. The research field of developing electronic materials for effectively and efficiently learning the law is still in its infancy. Main reason for this is the fact that Law schools and Law faculties approach the development of instructional materials as teaching and not as research. Another reason is that the design of electronic materials for learning the law is by definition interdisciplinary and requires a close relation with both legal research and instructional research. Finally, the few researchers that work in this area are not part of a common research community because there is no such community. There is a need for a forum for researchers and developers of electronic materials for learning the law to define the research agenda. In this paper we define the construction of electronic materials for learning the law as research and we set of defining the research agenda.