Elaine W. Shoben, University of Illinois Lectures on Line More time for Socratic dialogue Relief for oral learners My innovation is Lectures on Line. Wait! Before you conclude that something involving taped lectures is in opposition to Socratic method, let me assure you that it is not. Quite to the contrary, it is the way to liberate precious class time for more Socratic questioning and more policy discussions. The idea of Lectures on Line is to relegate lecturing to where it belongs - as a class supplement to support the real work in class. Lectures on Line are also the perfect companion to a casebook. They help guide students with your own words through the assigned reading and they enable oral learners to have repetition in the same manner that book learners can reread pages. They enrich and enhance rather than replace. Why do lectures on line release class time for analysis and policy? Among modern law teachers, even the most Socratic of us spend at least a little time lecturing on the basics of the course materials. We do so for many reasons, and we probably would not agree on which reason is most important. No matter. The point is that we find ourselves compelled to avoid educational malpractice (not much of a cause of action, but certainly a professional concept) by making sure that our students know some of the basic principles of the subject whose name graces the Registrar’s course list. Beyond teaching those basic principles, of course, we aspire to teach the students to apply them to new situations and to understand the policies behind them. These things come in good time, once the students have some idea about the subject. We each find our own way to convey those basic principles. Many of us lecture briefly at the beginning of each topic. Others lecture at the end of a section of study. The pure Socratic method leaves it to the students to divine all principles from the cases, but the complexities of modern law have made that approach impossible for most subjects. So we do a little lecturing. That lecturing can be taped and removed from the classroom. That’s the idea of Lectures on Line. The lecturing part can be put on a class web page and assigned for homework. The students then have your own words, recorded to guide them before or after the unit of study. Why does it help oral learners? You could write your thoughts down instead of speaking them, of course. But then there would be just more written words to supplement the text. One reason that university lecturing has survived the printing press is that many people learn better by listening to a lecture than by reading. Oral learners typically have only one chance to get it all, in comparison with their book-oriented peers who can reread pages as many times as they wish. Lectures on Line equalize that advantage. The oral learners can hear the lecture as many times as they want too. They can even stop and replay a little segment - just like rereading a paragraph. For all those times when you didn’t quite get something in a lecture - there’s a cure. Just rewind a little and play it again.