When All You've Ever Used is Textbooks: Changing Your Mindset on OER for Legal Education

Textbooks are the key to education...or is it? Have we been groomed to look unfavorable on anything that does not come from a textbook? The journey to OER can be scary and wrought with emotion. Questions abound on how to structure your course with something other than a textbook. Can it be done? YES it can, once you get past the roadblocks you put in place for yourself. I will share my journey from a "strict textbookalist" to freeing my mind to OER.

Teaching Smarter: Leveraging AI for Classroom Preparation, Instruction, and Assessment

Law professors face increasing demands on their time, particularly as they strive to prepare students effectively for an increasingly technology-driven practice environment. In this session, we explore practical, proven strategies for harnessing generative AI to streamline and enrich your teaching preparation process. Participants will learn how to efficiently create customized course exercises, tailored assignments, comprehensive lesson plans, and clearly structured course materials by leveraging AI-powered tools.

Critical Law Librarianship

Who are the librarians and scholars keeping a critical mind? 

What are they writing? 

Where are they publishing?

When does imposter syndrome stop?

Why does the phrase "pipeline to the profession" (often used to discuss bolstering diversity) feel ironic?

How do we resist threats to the vitality of the profession when resistance may risk personal safety and security? 

Rip that Band-Aid: Migrating Drupal 7 to 10 at the Legal Information Institute

In 2024 my colleagues at LII and I embarked on a daunting mission - migrating our Content Management System from Drupal version 7 to version 10. We needed to move tens of thousands of pages of content across dozens of collections, with many active user accounts, custom modules, and more while keeping our ability to generate static HTML content from our CMS. To a great extent we succeeded (with a few hiccups, to be sure!), with much help from our friends who developed the Migrate module from Drupal.

Practical Instructional Design: Efficient Video and Presentation Creation with AI Tools

Learn how to quickly and easily create clear, professional educational videos and presentations using accessible AI tools. In this hands-on session, we'll share the practical process developed at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, designed specifically to simplify instructional design without sacrificing quality. You'll see how straightforward it can be to move from an initial human-written script—enhanced by AI as an editorial assistant—to polished presentations generated with software like Gamma.

Fun with Drupal Webforms, Still trying

Generative AI (GenAI) can be a very helpful tool for instructors and students of law. This session focuses on specific applications of GenAI in legal education. These include:

* **Classroom use** — GenAI tools can be used in the classroom to help engage students and enhance learning. Examples include using ChatGPT to generate role-playing scripts to be used during discussions, or having students use a GenAI program to help them write short answer responses or exam papers.

Adventures in Educational A.I.

Over the last year, CALI has been working with a range of A.I. tools to generate supplements to our lessons, podcasts, casebooks, and other resources.  Our goal is to generate useful material in less time, and for less money than working from scratch.  

In this session Sara Smith and John Joergensen will discussi of our experiences using these tools.  We will talk about our successes, our failures, and what works best.  Issues such as hallucinations, straying off topic, and depth of coverage will be discussed.