One of the questions which has come up over the Christmas break, is the extent to which Practical or Professional Legal Skills can be delivered via a MOOC-type environment.
The delivery of general academic skills via a MOOC is pretty well established - the Centre for Achievment and Performance (CfAP) at the University of Northampton already has their Skills-based MOOC, and it is recruiting well.
Specific professional legal skills (negotiation, client intervieting, mooting and so on) are different, however.
The Bluhm Legal Clinic’s Entrepreneurship Law Center at Northwestern University in Chicago launched a MOOC in 2013, and the launch blog post (http://deansblog.law.northwestern.edu/2013/10/24/nu-law-mooc-is-here-28000-students-enrolled/) talked of the idea that:
"the development of core legal skills in the business space, including the small-business space, is essential"On investigation of the MOOC itseklf, the legal skills mentioned are not Practical Legal Skills as we know them, and are more related to drafting documents and so on.
The closest I have encountered (interestingly, a Google search of ""Professional Legal Skills" MOOC" only gave three results, all of which were to the same link ) was an HEA-funded workshop in 2014 called "Teaching research skills to Law Students: a workshop on best practice." (http://blogs.heacademy.ac.uk/social-sciences/2014/02/25/teaching-research-skills-to-law-students-a-workshop-on-best-practice/), and these skills were more research-based than advocacy or negotiation-based.
So, no-one seems to be doing negotiation, client interviewing of mooting via a MOOC platform,
That has piqued my interest, and so I will investigate...
