June 15, 2017

CALI turns 35 this year and we have a lot of projects cooking. Many of those projects are at the cutting edge of legal education and the adoption of new technologies.
We recently launched a brand new version of A2J Author which is used by courts and legal aid organizations to automate legal forms and processes for self representing lititgants. This new version is mobile-aware, runs in the browser and has a rudimentary document assembly system that challenges the Windows/MSWord-only hegemony that are designed for lawyers (not SRLs).
A2J Author is also available to law schools as a teaching tool in automated decision making, legal process automation and a host of other possible learning applications that are representative of 21st century law practice.
CALI now publishes over 50 law school casebooks under a Creative Commons license. These books are free in two ways. Free in the sense that they cost nothing to any faculty or students who want to download and use them. They are also “free” in the sense that they come with automatic permission to re-mix, re-use and re-publish. Faculty and students can download the PDF, MSWord or ebook versions of our books and use them as they need to fit their educational goals. With over 50,000 downloads, this consortia model of publishing is shaking up the staid textbook publishing market in legal education.
CALI has built an amazing formative assessment tool that sits on top of our 1000+ CALI lessons and lets faculty create their own multiple-choice quizzes. This technology is a combination of our CALI Author, LessonLink and Instapoll projects from the past. The formative assessment reporting system is called LessonLive because faculty can run a CALI lesson (or quiz of their making) inside the classroom and students can follow along, answering questions, with the results displayed on the faculty dashboard. This is like a clicker in every CALI lesson and can be run live or asynchronously.
Our newest tool that we call QuizWright, let’s faculty create their own, short, multiple-choice formative assessments where they can review the results live or later once everyone has completed the assignment. The software is open source and the system gives faculty complete control without requiring students to purchase or install anything on their own PCs or smartphones – everything runs in the browser.
There’s more going, so come to this session to get the news and join the discussion on CALI’s future. We crave feedback and ideas! I truly believe that CALI is entering a period of growth and advancement that is unprecedented in our history.