Frequently Asked Questions

LessonLink creates a unique URL that teachers provide to students. Once students begin work on a CALI Lesson or other resource uisng a LessonLink teachers have access to the students' work at varying level of detail. There is a basic grade report that shows how students did on on a particular Lesson or Lessons. Grade reports can be viewed online or downloaded as a spreadsheet. For a more detailed review there is an analytics view of student performance that shows how students did with the Lesson and offers question by question comparions across all the students in your class.

When using LessonLink there are some things to keep in mind:

• Grades and performance data for LessonLinks are only visible online to the faculty member who creates the LessonLink. In a co-teaching situation grade information will need to be downloaded as a spreadsheet and shared among colleagues.
•  Anyone with a CALI account and the LessonLink can run the lesson - it is not unique to a particular law school. The lesson performance of anyone who follows the LessonLink URL (and only those people) will be viewable by the faculty member who created the LessonLink.
• Faculty members may create an unlimited number of LessonLinks.  You should create new LessonLinks each semester so as to seperate the data.  Only the faculty who creates the LessonLink will be able to view the results.
• LessonLinks do not prevent students from running a CALI Lesson directly. If a student runs an assigned Lesson directly from the Lesson page there is no way to convert that into a LessonLink.

There are 2 parts to the LessonLink-It feature. First is the faculty side. This new feature does not change the creation/editing/cloning of LessonLinks at all. It simply adds a new View LessonLink-It Course Number button to the LessonLink dashboard on the faculty LessonLink page. Clicking the button opens a new page that shows the LessonLink-It course number along with some instruction on how and why to use it. Teachers get the number and pass it along to a student who ran a Lesson but didn't follow the LessonLink that the teacher provided.

The student side provides a form available from a Lesson run's saved score view to enter the LessonLink-It course number from the teacher. Once entered the course number is verified to make sure the LessonLink set exists and includes the Lesson that the student ran. Once verified the LessonRun record is updated to include the courseid and the results of the run are visible to the teacher. It is a one way change, once it is entered it cannot be taken away.

While faculty members could always use CALI Lessons, QuizWright quizzes, or CALI Author self-published lessons to provide self-paced learning opportunities or formative or summative assessment and then collect completion certificates as evidence of completed work, LessonLink provides faculty with the ability to assign Lessons and provides teachers with information about:

• who took a lesson
• how many times they took it
• when they took it
• what their grade was, and
• how they performed on a question by question basis

Creating a LessonLink is very easy! The whole process takes about five minutes.

1. Make sure you are logged into CALI with a Faculty account.
2. Go to the LessonLink page on the CALI website.
3. Click the button to "Create New LessonLinks".
4. Enter your course name. This can be anything you would like.
5. Pick the semester in which students will be using the LessonLinks, not when you are making it.
6. Select the CALI topic area which best describes your course. If you are teaching a class that covers more than one legal subject area, don't worry! You can back later and select another topic.
7. A list of all the CALI Lessons tagged with that subject will appear. You can then check the box next to the lessons that you would like to create LessonLinks for.
8. Click "Create LessonLinks" at the bottom of the page.
9. At this point you will be taken to a page that is titled with the name of the course you entered in Step 4 above. This page will have all the LessonLinks you have created.

Once you've created a set of LessonLinks here are some ponts to consider

• There is an option to edit or add LessonLinks this course's list of LessonLinks. Just look for the add/edit link.
• You should also receive an email with the URLs of your course page and LessonLinks. If the email doesn't show up in a few minutes please check your spam/junk folder.
• The URL of the course page or the URLs of each individual LessonLink can be shared with your students via email, your school's LMS (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, TWEN,etc) or any other means of communication.
• Using the course page or the individual LessonLinks depends on whether you wish to allow the students to view all of the LessonLinks at once or if you prefer to make them available on a more structured basis.
• To view student scores and performance, go to your "Current LessonLinks" dashboard. From there you can click the "details" button to view more information.
• While you can put a LessonLink URL into a Microsoft Word document, but students won't be able to Ctrl-Click to follow the link.  This is a limitation of Word and not LessonLink. Converting to PDF is your best option. This article explains all the gory details.

When you're creating a set of LessonLinks for a course selecting a topic just generates a list of CALI Lesson titles. Deciding which Lessons to add to the course using those titles lists is a bit daunting. To help with the decision about whether or not to add a Lesson to the course you can click on the info link next to each title to see a pop-up window with the full description, approximate completion time, and author for the Lesson. This data should make adding Lessons to a course a bit easier.

Yes, once you've created a set of LessonLinks for a course you can edit the details of the LessonLink set and add or remove Lessons from the LessonLink set.

To get started just look for the Edit/Add LessonLinks button on your LessonLink pages under the title of your course.

Click on the the button to open the LessonLink edit form.

With this form you can edit the name of the course, edit or add a website for the course, remove Lessons from the list of links by clearing the checks, or add more Lessons by selecting a topic from the drop down.

Once you're down with your edits, just hit the submit button at the bottom and your LessonLinks will be updated.

You can copy or clone a set of LessonLinks for use in another course, section. or semester by logging in to the CALI website and visiting your LessonLink pages. You'll find buttons for cloning LessonLinks on the current and archive LessonLink pages.

Cloning is simple, just click the clone button for the LessonLinks you want to copy. The button will take you to a page that lets you change the Course Name, select the semester that the LessonLinks will be used, and add or remove Lessons from the course. Once you're ready just hit the submit button and your new set of LessonLinks will be created. Information about your new LessonLinks will be on the current LessonLinks page and you should receive an email with the list of LessonLinks.

You should create new LessonLinks every semester. At the end of a semester you'll notice that links for the semester move to the archive tab, so it's a good idea to create a new set of LessonLinks every semester.

1. Even if you are still using it, the LessonLink is filed in the semester that it was created.
2. All student answers are cumulative for the life of the LessonLink. The purpose of LessonLinks is to view student performance, either on an individual or class basis. The results from every student that has ever taken the lesson will remain in the dataset on your LessonLink dashboard, making it difficult to find specific students and skewing aggregate results.

Besides, it takes less than five minutes to create a LessonLink! View the instructions for complete details.

CALI LessonLive is a feature that extends CALI LessonLink to allow teachers to use CALI Lessons and Self-Published Lessons live in the classroom and instantly get results as students work through the Lesson. When used with QuizWright Quizzes or CALI Author and Self-Published Lessons law teachers at CALI member schools can create assessments for real-time use in the classroom. LessonLive provides robust analytics and reporting to teachers to help them assess the work of their class. The analytics and reporting available through LessonLive is also available for LessonLink runs using the analytics features.

The video below provides an in-depth introduction to using LessonLive.

A CALI Course page is a single page that contains all of the LessonLinks a teachers creates for a course.  During the initial LessonLink creation process, a faculty member enters a course name for the set of  LessonLinks being created. Faculty members have the option of sharing the URL of this course page with students or sharing each LessonLink URL separately. The course page provides the teacher who created the LessonLinks with a small dashboard area the provides buttons to access student grades, add or edit the LessonLinks, and clone the LessonLinks to use in another course.

Generally speaking, only the student knows which CALI Lessons a student has taken and what their score was. However, if a faculty member would like to use CALI Lessons for formative or summative assessment, they have a few options to find student scores.

1. They can have students submit a lesson certificate that shows their completion and performance on a CALI Lesson. Each certificate lists the students' name, when they finalized the lesson, how many questions were attempted and how many they answered correctly.
2. If you use LessonLink, you will be able to view the scores and question-by-question performance of your students on a CALI Lesson.

Generally speaking, faculty are unable to view student performance on CALI Lessons. There are three exceptions:

1. Students provide the faculty member with a printed or digital version of the certificate that appears at the end of Lessons. This will provide only the score for the Lesson.
2. The faculty member creates a LessonLink and can view the scores and question by question performance directly via the "Current LessonLinks" tab for LessonLinks created that semester, provided that they are logged in with the faculty account that created the LessonLink.
3. The faculty member creates a QuizWright quiz or uses CALI Author to create a self-published lesson and can view student scores and question by question performance via the "My CALI Library" link from the CALI Dashboard menu.

For information please visit the FAQs on LessonLink, QuizWright, and self-published lessons.

LessonsLinks used in a Microsoft Word document may not work as expected and we recommend that you do not distribute them that way. When you use the <CTRL><Click> feature in Word the info that is sent to the web browser besides the link causes the web server to ignore any cookies that are set and that makes our site think that the students are not logged in. If they are not really logged they get the login form and can run the Lesson. If they are logged in to CALI, they get an error. This is known issue when linking to access controlled websites from inside of Word documents.

Students should be able to copy and paste the link from the Word document to the browser without any problem. We recommend providing students with the link to the list of LessonLinks that is created with each set of LessonLinks or posting the links on a CALI Classcaster course blog.

If your professor is using LessonLink and you correctly followed the special URL your professor provided to you, your professor will see your scores by viewing their LessonLink Dashboard. You won't have to do anything. However, if you did not use the URL that your professor gave to you, they will not be able to see your score.

If your professor is not using LessonLink or you did not use the URL that they provided, you can still show that you've taken a CALI Lesson by printing off the CALI Lesson Certificate. Please view the FAQ on printing CALI Lesson Certificates for complete instructions on how to print or save them.

A CALI LessonLink Lesson will appear exactly like a regular CALI Lesson. That's because it is one!  It just have a special URL that allows your professor to track your score and performance. There are a few ways to tell if you are taking one.

1. When you are running a CALI Lesson look for the LessonLink logo and your professor's name in the upper left of the Lesson viewer.
2. You are sent to a CALI Courses page with several lessons listed. It will have "courses" in the URL and the CALI Lessons listed will have "LessonLink" in their URL.
3. The URL of the CALI Lesson that your professor gives to you has the word LessonLink in it.
4. When you view your "My Lesson Runs" dashboard, your professor's name will appear in the "professor" column. If it's a regular CALI Lesson, this column will be blank.

If you are not seeing any of these indicators then you are not using a LessonLink and you should contact your professor to get the correct information.