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Professor Cynthia Adams won the inaugural IU McKinney Law Online Innovator Award for the 2015-16 academic year. She was honored for her pioneering work in teaching contract drafting online during the Fall 2015 semester. Contract drafting is a fully online simulation course that meets the requirements for experiential learning credit. Professor Adams included in the course an exercise in “mind-mapping,” through which students used free third-party software to produce graphical depictions of the contract terms being drafted.

Students weren’t getting the point that complex contract clauses can interact with one another, Professor Adams said. Utilizing mind-mapping with students in the course enabled them to grasp the concept.

“I thought it was a great success,” Professor Adams said of the process. “The students also really enjoyed it.”

“Cynthia’s work is precisely what we had in mind when we created the yearly Innovator Award for McKinney Law Online,” said Professor Max Huffman, director of online programs. “Every time faculty branch out from the tried and true methods, those efforts feed back into all of our work, and through that process of innovation and improvement our online courses are at the leading edge of online law teaching. We had a number of remarkable courses and design elements that we considered for this award. Cynthia’s class and the mind-mapping exercise simply rose to the top.”

McKinney Law Online offers 18 fully online courses and continues to innovate and to expand to meet student needs.