ATOLAW. com
Comprehensive basic legal education on-line

Or not. A few years ago, at the start of my involvement with on-line learning, I’d created an on-line paralegal certificate degree program. Which actually sounds much fancier that it was, as I basically found materials that would be good for a six-course program and, using the instructor materials provided by the publishers, made up a series of quizzes. Students would only need a password and ID to get into the quizzes, both of which they’d get once they’d paid me. That was Paralegal and Legal Assistant Training on-line, or, www.platon-line.com. With the quizzes in place, I thought of packaging them differently, and offer them as individual topics, so that instead of Module 4, learners could do just the two quizzes on employment law. That was www.atolaw.com, which looks like “A” to “law”, although I had meant “ato-“ because that was the shortest interval of law that I knew of. The individual course approach never panned out, although I’ve hung on to the URL.. . PLATon-line did okay, but it’s fallen somewhat to the wayside, because others had come up with better programs, ones that involved much more content than what I was providing, and I imagine that I’ll pull the plug on it, too. These were efforts at trying to create other streams of revenue; when I started to consider this option, it seemed clear to me that full-time college teaching was beyond my reach, so I was looking to other ways of pulling in funds… To create this, I used Netscape Composer, a free webpage editing browser. But today, with FrontPage – and even Word 2007 – it’s a lot easier to edit web content. Maybe once I’m done with the Masters, I’ll decide whether to continue with this effort or see what would amount to a more profitable use of my time…

George Guay gguay@bridgew.edu