Jeremy Peters, Assistant Professor of Music Business at Wayne State University and co-founder of Quite Scientific Records, and Catherine Brobston from Outreach at Harvard Law School spoke about “Remixing and Expanding Access to Legal Education Resources” at Open Ed 2021. Brobston introduced H2O, “an open education platform focused on legal resources and built for cloning and remixing.” The users currently are law professors, though Brobston mentioned that this is changing with more professors in other disciplines remixing content. The collection has 300 books! Peters re-evaluated the resources used in courses and wanted to find more current and engaging resources. Peters found Chris Bavitz’ class on music and media law on H20. The resources seemed useful for their needs. To assess the OER, Peters used both the student and instructor perspectives and asked students for their input. Peters mentioned that it was straightforward to build a new course using the H2O platform. Peters cloned the course, took out most of the legal review articles, reorganized content to fit intent, and updated as needed. It seems very easy to update content without redoing too much: Peters explained how they added new readings and articles quickly. Brobston shared how users can search H2O for professors, topics, books… Brobston demonstrated cloning a book, rearranging, and editing materials. Users can also include links and embed materials. What struck me as really efficient was how quickly users could search for cases and materials by simply pasting in the links! opencasebook.org is the URL for the system. Peters emphasized that this resource has “long legs outside of law” which is really telling and encouraging.
