Leveraging on technology

ONE OF my problems as a law professor is my frequent travels here and abroad. This is especially true in the Ateneo Law School, where the attendance of professors is recorded just as the attendance of the students are checked.

Obviously, the attendance of law professors is being checked so as not to shortchange the students. The policy has been demonstrably proven right, as shown by the quality of its graduates and their performance in the yearly bar examinations conducted by the Supreme Court.

There are video conferencing facilities nowadays. Availing of the facility can be expensive, though. First, you have to buy the necessary equipment consisting of a television set, codec, camera and microphone. Second, you have to pay the telephone company a monthly fee. Third, for the technology illiterates like most lawyers, they have to have an employee with the technical know-how to install and operate the facility. As far as I can recall, we invested about a million pesos just to buy the equipment when we first decided to use the technology at Accra.

Indeed, there are some companies that want to avail of this facility, but their concern is  cost. Understandably so. I recall when we were doing the rules on electronic notarization. I proposed the inclusion of a requirement for video conferencing to help ensure the identity of the person acknowledging or subscribing to a document before the electronic notary. There was quite a discussion on the cost of the requirement.

Anyway, in one of my foreign trips last year, my students in securities regulation, resourceful as they were, got wind of my foreign travel. Obviously, somebody who knew of my trip tipped them. Prudent as they were, they asked one of my sons who is studying in the Ateneo whether the information was true.  My son confirmed that I would be away on a foreign trip.

So what did my students do? Like other students, they were extremely elated. It was a free day for them.

Parenthetically, I never lecture in class. Classes under me is 101 percent recitation. I grill my students the Socratic way on their class assignment. I’m fond of giving hypotheticals to test whether they understand the provisions of law and cases. I also do it to test whether they can analyze and apply them to the hypothetical. Often, I ask them to apply legal principles to present-day situations. Insofar as case assignment is concerned, I often ask them whether the decision is correct. If yes, why, and if not, why not? I sometimes ask them to disagree with themselves. When I assign foreign cases, I ask them whether the case is applicable in the Philippines. Not infrequently, a student can be called for recitation up to five times during the class.

Ironically, they enjoy classes under me. At  least that’s what the evaluation of my class at the end of the semester uniformly say year in and year out.

So, after receiving the confirmation from my son that I would be away on a foreign trip, my students did not fully prepare for class that day. What they did not know was that I had plans experimenting on conducting class through FaceTime. Hence, about two hours before class, I texted the class beadle that I would be conducting class and to prepare for it. I then conducted class via FaceTime. The result was quite disastrous as my students did not prepare well for class.

The rest is history. Whenever I am out of town, I have been conducting classes since I first tried the experiment. I even did it recently, when I could not get to class on time because of the Christmas traffic.

That is how I leverage on technology when conducting my classes. You may want to give it a try. You may encounter some problems due to poor Internet connection, but you will enjoy it. My students do, at least I am told. I don’t know with your students, though.

(The author, a senior partner of Angara Abello Concepcion Regala & Cruz Law Offices (Accralaw), is a law professor in Ateneo de Manila University. The views in this column are exclusively his, and should not be attributed in any way to the institutions with which he is currently affiliated. He may be contacted through [email protected].)