Here at Georgetown, librarians teach the Lexis and Westlaw classes. It's a lot of work, since we have 625 first-year students. We do 40 classes on one system in September and 40 classes on the other system in January. All classes are hands-on, held in the Library's computer classroom. Some seven of my colleagues volunteer to teach several sessions each, and I usually do 10 or 15 of them. I also create the curriculum, hand-outs, etc., schedule the classes, and write up an evaluation report at the end.
We have a large contingent of foreign LLM students, who all take a class on U.S. legal research during their first term. We do about five sessions on Lexis for them, too, hands-on, taught by librarians (each section of their research class has a liaison librarian), using a curriculum adapted from our 1L training.
In addition to the above new-student training, we offer advanced Lexis and Westlaw (just a few sessions per semester), again hands-on, taught by a librarian (i.e., me). We used to offer introductory classes outside of the first-year sessions, but found the demand was pretty low, so for students who don't take the above classes but who need introductory-level training I have created self-directed tutorials, which include a handout with information that we want them to have, plus a booklet from the company with screen shots and explanations of the different functions. This is the first time we've tried this approach, so I don't know how well it will work.
My higher-ups believe, and I wholeheartedly agree, that the advantages of doing the training ourselves far outweigh the disadvantages.
Con:
1. Lots of work: I would say all of the stuff connected with our classes takes about 20 - 25% of my time (not evenly distributed, of course).
2. Requires very understanding colleagues, who must fit teaching into their already busy schedules at the beginning of each semester. (Obviously, this system wouldn't be possible at all without them -- no one person could teach 40 classes in three weeks.)
Pro:
1. Allows us to control the curriculum, to make it more objective and less marketing-driven than the company-sponsored classes. We present comparisons between Lexis and Westlaw (and between CALR and book research) that company reps would not.
2. The January class can build on the September class. In other words, if the 1Ls learned Westlaw in September, when we teach them Lexis in January we can relate the unfamiliar Lexis functions to the Westlaw functions they already know. A company rep would act as if they were starting from scratch, which I think reduces effectiveness.
3. We can work closely with the Legal Research and Writing faculty to tie together our Lexis and Westlaw training with their curriculum. I don't think the faculty would work so closely, if at all, with the company reps.
4. The students meet librarians in these classes and see that we are knowledgeable about Lexis and Westlaw. This encourages students to turn to us with CALR questions, which we want them to do because we can help them better than the company reps. We see the big picture, we can suggest ways of doing their research outside Westlaw or Lexis, we know the Library's resources.
I'm sure there are other advantages that don't occur to me at the moment (other disadvantages, too).
There is one type of training that's done here by the company reps: each Spring, they come in to do their "prepare to practice" classes for our students who are going to summer associate jobs where their firms require them to take such classes.
Hope this helps... Let me know if you have further questions.
Bill Taylor * 202-662-9141 * taylorw@law.georgetown.edu
Reference & Electronic Services Librarian
Georgetown Law Library
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:50:03 PST