dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman) (01/07/86)
(The issue of CAI has been raised in this group. While we're not
teaching CS, this seems the best place to discuss what we're doing.)
I'd like to describe briefly what the Law Society is doing in
CAI, and in a later posting ask for suggestions regarding our
current efforts.
The Law Society of Upper Canada is the governing body of Ontario's
lawyers, and runs the Bar Admission Course. Passing the BAC is
required before one can become a lawyer in this province. The
BAC consists of a year of "articling" (working for a lawyer) followed
by a 6-month "teaching term", where about 12 subjects are taught in
succession, with an exam every two weeks or so.
We've developed a complete course on the basics of income tax
which takes most students 10-25 hours to complete. It's made available
to them during their articling year, and they are now expected to
come to the teaching term with a basic knowledge of income tax which
we can build on in the Business Law section of the course.
The CAI runs on this machine (a Perkin-Elmer 3220 running v7 UNIX),
which has 42 ports. We've set up terminal rooms in Toronto, Ottawa and
London, Ontario (the three teaching-term locations), as well as in
law libraries in 10 other cities around the province, which students
use during their articling year. At busy times, it's not unusual to
have 25 students on at a time. For access from out of town, we use
Datapac (local calls to the user); for access from users at law firms
in Toronto, we have modems and a connection to QL terminals (legal
research terminals located in large law firms).
This year, students in the teaching term (at Toronto, Ottawa and London)
are now taking "Accounting for a Law Office" via CAI as well. This
course was taught with lectures in the past, but was switched to CAI
to free up teaching time for a new course in Practice Skills.
The exam will be taken on-line (more about that in my next posting).
I'll describe our CAI environment in a later posting, if people are
interested. Also, if anyone's interested in knowing more about our
CAI project, I have a couple of reports which I can send out.
David Sherman
Bar Admission Course
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Osgoode Hall
Toronto, Canada M5H 2N6
(416) 947 3466
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{ ihnp4!utzoo pesnta utcs hcr decvax!utcsri } !lsuc!dave