Learning for a Co-operative World

Book excerpt: This is not your traditional contracts casebook. Instead, Learning Contracts provides fifty discrete "lessons" covering the full body of basic contract law, including a comparative approach to coverage of the common law, UCC Article 2 and the CISG. Each lesson includes expected learning outcomes followed by highly structured presentations, detailed explanations, illustrative examples, and helpful summaries, all designed to make the doctrine more readily accessible to students than the traditional case method. Learning Contracts includes only a few carefully selected teaching cases, thus leaving the bulk of class time for the application of newly introduced doctrinal materials to the problems at the end of each lesson. While only a few classic cases are presented as such in their original form, many others are presented in the form of examples or problems. Learning Contracts can easily be covered in its entirety in a traditional 4, 5 or 6 credit Contracts course (supplementing the text with additional problems and a wide variety of formative assessments in the latter case). However, the book is uniquely suited for a "flipped" approach to instruction in which more of the basic doctrine is delivered outside of the classroom (through the basic text, videos, discussion boards or other means of introducing doctrine online) and class time focuses far more on interactive exercises and ongoing formative assessment. Lesson-by-lesson outcomes provide further support for overall course level outcomes, while lesson-by-lesson organization provides a ready-made structure for Team-Based Learning or any other modularized learning environment. In short, Learning Contracts is specifically designed to facilitate and support today's greater focus on outcomes and assessment.