The Accidental Entrepreneur

Thanks to Al for the introduction and to Dan Filler and the rest of the Faculty Lounge crew for the kind invitation to guest post.

It's a familiar tale: you're an eccentric law professor in your mid-40s, and one day you look around to discover your children are getting older, your hair is turning grey, and you accidentally founded a high tech legal ed start-up.  

It's that last bit I thought I'd write about.  

When I began teaching, I found myself drawing charts to help me organize my courses -- charts that visually represented, and therefore helped me understand, how the concepts I was teaching were related to each other within a system.  Eventually it occurred to me that if the charts aided my understanding, they might help my students too.  So I shared them.  The effect on student comprehension was immediate.  What had seemed to them like a meteor shower of disparate concepts became useful constellations instead.  We even built some charts together in class.

Intrigued, I dug into the educational literature and found that the research was pretty unequivocal: concept maps were pedagogically superior to text alone for understanding the relationships between ideas within systems.  Books are wonderful for lots of things, but it turns out they are not the best tool available to us for teaching systemic relationships between concepts.  

The next year the casebook I had been using came out with yet another new edition (its 3rd in 6 years).  The changes were trivial -- just enough to alter the pagination so that using a mix of editions was unworkable.  I reluctantly assigned the new edition, but for the 1st time, I asked about its price (after all, I always got my copy for free).  $250, for one book, for one class.  I considered switching to an e-casebook version, but I found that the e-book was really just a pdf'd version of the book with a few hyperlinks and the publisher was still charging $180 for it.

It occurred to me that in the best of all worlds, courses could be formatted as concept maps, and the maps would contain within them all of the material for the course -- cases, statutes, practice problems, background readings, powerpoints, decision trees, even videos.  That would replace the casebook with something that was pedagogically better, more comprehensive, more flexible, and less expensive.

But I'm a technophobe.  Not only couldn't I create such a thing, it took me weeks to figure out what the people who possibly could are called (software developers, it turns out . . . but you probably knew that).  Still, the idea gnawed at me, until I took my pencil-and-paper drawings to a bunch of software development companies and asked them if they could make something like my drawings, except interactive and on one of those computer thingees.  Their answer?  Yup -- for a price.  As your typically business-savvy academic, I then tried to give the idea away. In this case, to several major publishers.  But my pitch to them -- 'just think of how much less you could charge your customers!' -- somehow did not generate the enthusiasm I imagined.

So, faced with adversity, I gave up.  Except I couldn't quite.  Because my students were swaying under a mountain of debt.  Because I knew I could teach them better with a tool designed to show the structure of relationships between concepts.  

So, I gave the developers my kids' college fund (for real -- don't tell them) and formed a company with two professor colleagues.  We called the company ChartaCourse.  We simply asked ourselves: what do we, as law professors, want in our teaching materials? We came up with 4 fundamental goals:

(1) A new format that constantly reveals and reinforces the structure of our courses.  True to the original vision, we wanted concept maps that charted entire law school courses, with all of the content for the course actually embedded within the map itself, in the right spots.  Students should constantly see the 'forest' of the course and the particular 'tree' of each concept we are studying.  And all of the material for that concept should be available with one click.  Here's what it looks like.  Notice that the dark blue color creates a trail from the general to the specific as we move from left to right:

 (click on the image to expand it)

And here's what happens when the user clicks on Pierson v. Post from the card of the left:

(click on the image to expand it)

(2) Complete customization.  Once a chart was created for a course by one of our authors, we wanted every adopting professor to be able to customize it completely.  She should be able to easily add material, delete material, edit material, re-arrange the chart, embed her syllabus, etc., and those changes should be visible only to her own students. For example, in my personal version of the Crim Pro chart, I have added a video of Freddie Gray's arrest:

 (click on the image to expand it)

(3) A conscionable price.  We have been unwittingly complicit in gouging our students.  The graph below shows that textbook prices have increased even more rapidly than healthcare costs over the past 20 years.  Enough is enough.  Instead of $250, we decided to charge $50. 

(4) Community.  We wanted to create a community of enthusiastic professors among our authors and adopters, willing to share teaching materials and ideas with each other.  

We are only 2 years old, but we are fulfilling all four goals.  We now have charts for 8 different law school courses,* authored by law professors from around the country (and soon, Canada, too).  We have many more on the way.**  Our charts are being used by a growing, active community of professors at about 20 law schools in our second year, up from 4 in our first year.  

There's no magic or mystery about why professors are adopting ChartaCourse charts.  It's very simple: they are a much better teaching tool than casebooks, at a much lower price.  

If you want to try out a live demo of a chart, just go to our homepage, www.ChartaCourse.com.  And, if you'd like your own demo chart you can explore and completely customize, just shoot me an email, and we'll get you all set up.  It's actually a lot of fun.

In my future posts, I'll address the pros, cons and ethical quandaries of self-funding innovative projects in the post-correction law school world; the critical role of the internet in removing barriers between us and our students, and shifting control away from huge publishers and back to professors; and the literature on concept-mapping.

*Property, Torts, Contracts, Civil Procedure, Evidence, Constitutional Law I (Powers), Criminal Procedure, and Business Organizations.

**Family Law, Professional Responsibility, Constitutional Law II (Liberties), Criminal Procedure II, Bankruptcy, Estates and Trusts, Sales, Civil Rights, International Taxation, and more to come.

Comments

[Enrique Guerra-Pujol]

This is very exciting. I am teaching an undergraduate course on "Facebook Law"--using the founding of Facebook as depicted in the book "The Accidental Billionaires" as an in-depth case study to explore issues in business law and business ethics, and the Concept Chart idea looks very promising, but at the same, this method looks like it requires a lot of additional work in order to put it all together. What's in it for the professor?

[Emily Horvath]

At the risk of sounding like my students....SO COOL. It seems to provide an easy tool for class content delivery and management that many professors want but don't have the time to prepare. I'll be checking out your free demo soon.

[Colin Starger]

As a ChartaCourse user and fan, I'd like to respond briefly to Enrique. First, getting your own Charta up to speed does indeed take a good amount of work -- but not necessarily much more than prepping with a brand new casebook. But once you put in the work, the payoff is huge. You have a whole new type of flexibility in terms of course sequencing. You can interconnect all the content so circling back to old concepts or even foreshadowing new ones is a breeze. I especially like the side-by-side feature of the interface which lets you compare text very easily. (I am using ChartaCourse for a combined Civil Procedure/Introduction to Lawyering Skills class and often will have a FRCP rule up next to a case interpreting that rule.) Plus there is certainly the SO COOL factor pointed out by Emily. Students like it and I think you get some props for bringing in something innovative and inexpensive. You feel like you are part of something other than a normal law school course...

[Mark Edwards]

Thank you, Emily! Please feel free to send me an email at [email protected] if you'd like, and we can get you set up with your own personal demo version of any charts you'd like to explore!

[Mark Edwards]

Thanks for the good question, Enrique! The charts come to adopting professors as complete courses. The idea is that if the adopting professor doesn't want to add or change anything, she doesn't have to. But if she wants to, she can alter it completely as well. Most opt for a little of each.

On the other hand, if we don't have a chart for the course the professor is teaching, we may work with the professor so she can become the author of that chart. Then there's lots in it for the professor -- the ChartaCourse royalty system is much more generous to our authors than anything academics are used to. That's because we are profs ourselves; we know how much work goes into careful design, creation, selection, and editing of great teaching materials; and we are determined to move the reward for that work back to professors.

Feel free to shoot me an e-mail at [email protected] if you'd like to talk more about whether ChartaCourse would work well for your course!

[Enrique Guerra Pujol]

Thanks for the clarification ... I will be in touch soon!

[Barry]

It looks great!

[Mark Edwards]

Thank you, Barry! if you'd like to try it out just shoot me an email.