KUWAIT UNIVERSITY, CIVIL LAW, AND THE INTERNET

Genesis of a Dedicated Civil Law-Teaching Website 

Dr. Mashael A. Alhajeri

mashael@law.kuniv.edu

IT Unit

Kuwait University School of Law (KUSL)

I. THE TEAM

The current project is the result of cooperation of two people from different disciplines; nationalities; and gender. Nonetheless, enthusiasm, mutual understanding and open lines of communication played a key role in this project's realization.

Mashael A. Alhajeri is a faculty member of Kuwait University School of Law (KUSL), with a PhD degree in comparative Private Law from the University of Essex, UK (2004), and the Head of KUSL Information Technology Unit. While out of KUSL's 80 faculty members only four are females, Dr. Alhajeri is the first female faculty to ever join the Private Law Department since KUSL's inception in 1967.

Amr S. Abo Hamer is a computer engineer with an LLB in Computer and Information Sciences, Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt (2002), and is currently the Executive Manager of the KUSL Information Technology Unit. Eng. Abo Hamer is the first staff member with an IT degree to be employed by KUSL.

                                                     II. THE PROJECT 

Project Background

The Arab world still lags behind in information technology. In the particular field of higher education, although Arab universities have been among the first institutions in the region to connect to the Internet, use of World Wide Web resources have been noticeably restricted to faculty research purposes.[1] As a result, the level of use of the Internet as an educational medium is very unsatisfactory, if not at all lacking. Indeed, students of the said universities generally lack the opportunities to learn anything 'online' – IT learning culture remarkably underdeveloped. This conclusion is almost universal to all Arab universities. As far as could be determined, very few Arab law schools professors, if any, make all their courses material fully available on the intent for their students' use.

In 2004, and upon her graduation of the University of Essex where she read for her PhD degree, Dr. Alhajeri joined KUSL for as a post-doctoral researcher. Shortly, the degree to which IT literacy prevailed in the said institution was clear to her (eg PCs were for the exclusive use of administrative staff used PCs; none of the faculty had any on their desks). After assessing the IT situation in the school, she immediately volunteered to found an IT Unit at KUSL; a job which she took in addition to her teaching and administrative duties. This enthusiasm met a welcome response by the KUSL dean, who endorsed this vision as being in line with KUSL plan to acquire academic accreditation by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).

To this effect, Dr. Alhajeri joined efforts with two administrative staff that had computer training, of which Eng. Abo Hamer was one, and the KUSL IT Unit was incepted. The newly incepted IT Unit's functions were broadly defined as follows:

• To spread IT awareness amongst KUSL faculty and students;
• To prepare IT Labs for students use
• To spearhead the process of IT development in KUSL;
• To design and administer KUSL and faculty websites;
• To put together a lecture-theatre automation plan for KUSL teaching halls (ie converting these halls into 'smart-classes');
• To subscribe at various law databases for
• To provide technical support for KUSL faculty and students; and
• To administer the procurement of computers and IT equipment for KUSL needs

However, as ambitious as this schema was, and despite the shortage of funds (in fact, due to budgetary constraints, the IT Unit was allocated none, and had therefore to be quite 'resourceful' to generate the necessary funds!), it is now estimated that about 60% of the aforementioned goals was achieved within a year and a half.

 Project Description

The current project is a website that was initially launched on April 2005. In its current format, it was solely designed by team member, Eng. Abo Hamar and dedicated for three Civil Law-based courses that Dr. Alhajeri teaches at KUSL. These courses being:

• Obligation and Evidence
• Foundations of Obligations
• Methods of Legal Research

The current project is meant to serve as a paradigm for the use of the Internet as a law learning medium in Arab Higher education, with a very low budget. Its very basic and simple idea is to spread awareness of the potential the Internet holds as a learning means, and to encourage peer faculty to put their course materials online for students' easy access.

Website URL on the Internet is:

http://law.kuniv.edu.kw/mashael

Project Format / Structure

The website comprises two parts:

(A)   Dynamic Part:

·        News flash / ticker (updated news)

·        Live Web Cam (pictures from metropolises around the world)

(B)   Static Part:

·        Main Page

·        Research

·        Links

·        Grades

·        Contact information

·        Courses:

o       Obligations & Evidence Course

o       Research Methods Course

o       Methods Of Legal Research

Under each of these courses, materials are respectively presented according to the following taxonomy:

      §         Course Description

§         Lecture Notes

§         Slide Shows (Power Points Presentations)

§         Pop Quizzes

§         Exams

§         Work Sheets

§         Comparative Charts

§         Transparencies

§         Diagrams

§         Samples of Students' Work

Project Philosophy

The project was conducted with intense focus on the following overriding concerns:

• Free access: it is perceived that this is a fundamental key to the project's success. The website required no login names or passwords. All users, whether from KUSL or other entities (locally based or from abroad), have free and full access to all course material. Dr. Alhajeri, as writer, waived all her intellectual property rights over the said material.
• Simplicity and ease of use: as many KUSL students feel intimidated by IT in general, and use of Internet for learning purposes in particular).
• Exposure to foreign languages: KUSL students are basically monolingual; they speak Arabic, mainly. Very few have a fair command of English as a foreign language. Therefore - although it was inevitable that all course material be put on the website in Arab - it was thought that exposure to foreign languages was a strongly needed. Thus, all lecture handouts as put on the website are furnished with a bilingual, and sometimes trilingual, glossary (Arabic / English / French).
• Diversified use of learning material: visual aids have never been a part of KUSL culture at any given point of its evolution. To overcome this deficiency, the team decided to add visual aids to course material whenever possible (transparencies, power point presentations, links to other websites), with particular emphasis on lecture notes (in which a wealth of graphs, cartoons, scans, and newspaper clippings were added).
• Exposure to Comparative law: study and exposure to Comparative legal systems of the world are lacking in KUSL curriculum. Material in the website partly acknowledges this shortcoming through presentation of comparative case law and.
• Managing functional IT projects with limited funds: the message that the team wished to convey was that IT use for educational purposes need not be an expensive venture. In putting together the web components of this project, Eng. Abo Hamer used basic software and utilities, the kind of which was readily available in the market., this software being:

§         Microsoft FrontPage 2003

§         Macromedia FalshMX

§         Swish v 2.0

§         Adobe Photoshop ME

§         Adobe Illustrator

§         Microsoft Word2003

§         Microsoft PowerPoint 2003

§         .Net Framework

(Moreover, the website was launched on the internet using a server of an old make!) 

Project Self-Assessment

As far as could be determined, the functions achieved by this website, as a learning facility, have not been presented by any other peer Arab University or a Higher Educated Institute. The Arab World still lags behind with respect to use of Information technology in higher education, a problem which is regarded as a major development impediment.

Since all three courses of which the material is put on the website could primarily be traced to one thread, being the Civil Law, the site proved to be of particular help to students and faculty of peer Arab Universities. This is because Kuwait is an evident example for a civil Law country, and can be taken as an indicator to other Arab countries of which the legal systems are based on the legal doctrine, both in the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen) and North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco). Feedback received from these universities was most encouraging.

The team estimates that this projects major points of strength are the following:

• The website is marked with notable wealth and diversity of learning material (lecture notes, slide shows, pop quizzes, exams, work sheets, comparative charts, transparencies, diagrams, and samples of students' work).
• Open access was a key to 'popularity'; no login names or pass words are required. This is to be contracted with E-Learning courses (also known Distant-Learning courses) which are restricted to students who are actually registered in the course.
• Economics of this project demonstrates that, contrary to widely misconceived ideas, use of information technology should not necessarily be a costly venture, and that all universities, even those with budget constraints, as the case usually is in developing countries, could readily embark on a similar venture.
• The team is proud to emphasize that this project was conducted within strict ethical guidelines. Its members insisted in using licensed copies from all software used (this was the teams contribution towards the country's ongoing campaign to fight software piracy, which seems to be a flourishing business in many Arab States, including Kuwait).[2]
• Exposure to comparative law through course material (eg lecture notes, power point presentations) marked the course material of the website with distinctive 'flavor'.
• Despite the complete lack of publicity, The website proved so popular with course students. This could be judged from the number of people that visited the site during its short life. For during the period from April 2005 to June 2006, a number of 1080 visits were recorded (whereas total number of students recorded in the actual three courses is less than 100).

Finally, it remains to say that, despite the admittedly educational nature of this website, the team strongly believes in the promising potential of the Internet, and that on the marginalia of education, the World Wide Web could be utilized as a medium of communication to serve other worthy causes.[3]