There is no need for everyone to be logged into the system at the same moment. The nature of the communication is likely to change too, as people have more time to contemplate their response to discussion points. The law department at Lancaster University has been using a conferencing system based around Lotus Notes for the last year. Lotus Notes was adopted as a centrally supported conferencing system for the whole university in 1996, and has been in use since 1993. The conferencing system is being used by students for inter-team negotiations as part of a case study.
Correspondence is required to be conducted electronically.
All the notes relating to the case study are available on the Intranet, and any communication between the students and their lecturers has to be via the conferencing system. It is the first time that the law school has conducted such case studies without using seminars, and so the results are eagerly awaited. While it is undoubtedly early days in the use of the Internet for teaching law, its growth must be inevitable. The Dearing Report's endorsement of the use of IT to support teaching is likely to encourage more widespread use of interactive courseware and computer conferencing systems in general, while the trend towards more flexible patterns of learning must fuel the use of the Internet as a delivery mechanism. We still await the communications bandwidth required for the Internet to reach its full potential, but few doubt that it will come, and many expect it to arrive soon.