Professor Peter Sankoff displaying one of his "capsules"
U of A Faculty of Law's Professor Peter Sankoff has been awarded a $22,547 grant from the University of Alberta's Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund for his project "Core Concept Delivery Outside the Classroom: Adapting Lessons from the Khan Academy to University Instruction".
In direct support of Dare to Discover: A Vision for a Great University and the learning, discovery and citizenship cornerstones, the TLEF has been created by the University of Alberta to improve teaching and learning effectiveness. The purpose of this fund is to enable all persons engaged in teaching at the University to improve their teaching skills, enhance their understanding of teaching and learning processes, and provide environments that increase student learning.
Professor Sankoff's project, "Core Concept Delivery Outside the Classroom: Adapting Lessons from the Khan Academy to University Instruction", is designed to help create a new way of helping students learn difficult legal concepts. Over the past three years, Professor Sankoff has transformed his class on the Law of Evidence from a standard lecture format into one that focuses on dynamic problem solving and application of evidentiary principle. His experience revealed that students who worked on evidence problems in this way developed a much better understanding of the law and were more quickly able to apply it in challenging situations. The problem was that students often complained that they lacked a basic understanding of some of the more difficult evidentiary concepts before digging into the problems.
His solution drew upon the inspiration of The Khan Academy, a not-for-profit organization that makes short web-based classroom lessons available to anyone who wishes to learn. It uses modern software and touch pad technology to create lessons with dynamic visuals that are both educational and entertaining. This year, for the first time, the foundational law and explanation of basic concepts in Professor Sankoff's class was not delivered through lectures. Instead, students prepared for class by watching short "capsules" video podcasts of 10-20 minutes in duration that Professor Sankoff created beforehand and posted on-line.
A survey conducted to research the effects suggests that the capsules have been widely embraced and have the potential to deliver multiple benefits. In addition to being available on demand (which allows students repeat viewings, and the choice of when to watch), they free up class time to focus on deeper learning objectives and allow the possibility of exploring additional topics that could never be reached before.
The TLEF grant will allow Professor Sankoff to explore the benefits of "capsule" use in greater detail, expand their utility within his classes, and prepare guidance for others who wish to pursue this method of teaching. Given the tendency in legal education to move towards active based learning models, Professor Sankoff hopes his project results will show that capsules have enormous potential as a means of delivering complex and often dense material - something law, in particular, requires - as a supplementary teaching strategy, permitting more productive use of valuable classroom time.