Student involvement

Last week was the second tranche of the students involvement with the project.

A particular chunk of  ILOOC (on Confluict of Laws) was embedded within the VLE, and a group of students were asked to compete it over a three-day period.

The timescale was slightly artificial, but this was deliberate, as it gave the students more of a chance of interacting with each other more or less contemporaneously.

14 students were invited to participate, 8 agreed, and 5 took part. The archive was observed after the event by a colleague, and the level of engagement with the task is being assessed.

Participants have also been invited to a 1-2-1 debrief interview.

All of the resulting data will be analysed and incoporated into the resuting paper.

Update

Since my last post, I have had another abstract accepted, this time for the institute of Learning and Teaching Congerence on 21st May at the University of Northampton.

I have also arranged the second tranche of student evaluation, which will take place w/c 9th March. Unlinke the first tranche, where students were operating at a very minor level on the ILOOC content, this session will be more in-depth. As a result, the student are volunteers from a pool initially selected by me, rather than leaving it to chance.

On 9-11 March they will interact with one entire section of ILOOC and, in addition to my involvement, one of my colleagues will be observing as part of a wider Collaboaritve Obervation of Online Learning project.

Abstract Accepted for SLSA Conference 2015

This is the abstract submitted and accepted for the Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference in April 2015 (in the Legal Education strand)

Could you make it a bit more MOOCy?

Dr Simon Sneddon, University of Northampton

Key words: MOOC; Connectivism; Blended Learning

This paper takes as a starting point one of Paul Schrag's views of the future; that one of the only ways law schools are going to survive is by “incorporating MOOCs” into their offering, by blending the delivery and using MOOCs for information delivery and live teachers for face-to-face sessions.

The paper argues that while HEIs are moving toward blended learning, the starting point, however, is generally the traditional lecture and seminar module, with additional online resources and some online assessment. Stephenson wrote that “Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people's experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge” and Siemens (2005) also said that connectivism has implications for the design of learning environments. This paper suggests that the use of MOOC elements accessible to students and non-students can help to incorporate elements of connectivism more directly into law teaching.

The author co-developed an International Law MOOC in 2013/14, and this was deconstructed and evaluated by existing final year undergraduate law students, who were asked to judge the attraction, perceived usefulness, suitability for existing modules, and levelness of each element. Their responses are being used to design cMOOC-style elements within the final year of undergraduate law modules that are open to both students and non-students, and will allow all participants to interact.

The paper concludes that Schrag’s view, while perhaps a little apocalyptic in nature, is nonetheless an extremely useful starting point for the future of delivering legal education.

REFERENCES:

Schrag, P., MOOCs and Legal Education: Valuable Innovation or Looming Disaster, Villanova Law Review, [Vol. 59: p.83, 2014]

Siemens, G., 2005, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/article01.htm

Stephenson, K., n/d, What Knowledge Tears Apart, Networks Make Whole, http://www.netform.com/html/icf.pdf [Reprinted from Internal Communication Focus, no. 36]

Can you deliver Legal Skills via a MOOC?

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...

Abstracts written

Dissemination of the project

My focus this week has been on drafting abstracts for dissemination of the work. It is a tricky process, as the bulk of the work has not yet been ciompleted, and the conclusions are not known, so the abstract needs to find the right balance. It needs to entice the reviewer, and convince then that there is work of merit and interest on the way, but at the same time, it does not want to promise the Earth, and then fail to deliver.

The abstract (or abstracts, for there were two) have been written with useful feedback from colleagues, and submitted to two conferences in March and April - the Association of Law Teachers 50th Annual Conference, in Cardiff, and the Socio-Legal Studies Association 25th Annual Conference, in Warwick. I've gone for "Can you make it more MOOCy?" as the title, althuogh this may change slighlty as time goes on. I've always had a tendency for short, snappy titles for papers, as I strongly believe that it is important to grab the reader / conference delegate's attention and make them want to attend.

As the date for the UoN ILT Annual Conference has also been announced (21st May 2015), the abstract can be revised and submitted there as well.

A first draft of a paper is going to be presented at the Law Staff Seminar day in January 2015, and the feedback from that will be incorporated into later versions.

This week is more of a looking to the future week, and by next week, I hope to have some progress to report from the students.

How will we select our student helpers?

This has been a bugbear of the project, but a rather elegant solution has presented itself.
This year, one of our Year 3 Law modules has been partially revamped, and part of the content is going to involve the students covering one section of ILOOC as part of their seminar preparation.
This is, to coin a prhase making a virtue out of a necessity, but the students used for evaluating the content ILOOC and the likelihood of this type of content being suitable for face to face classes.

Time-wise, the project is progressing largely as expected, althuogh the student evaluation of content and subsequent revision of content will slip by a week or so. This is not problematic, since a degree of slippage was incorporated into the project timetable.

What did we use in ILOOC? #2

One of the elements that was used several times in ILOOC was the short (5-10 minute) Youtube clip, prepared by external bodies.

This worked quite well, and we were aware of the importance of keeping the clips short - this links to last week's post, and will be important for clips that we create.

Disturbingly, there is some suggestion that even the 5 minute clip may be too long. In 2008, the consultancy company Tubemogbul (http://www.tubemogul.com/) assessed people's attention span while watching video clips.

Their results suggest that fewer that 1 in 10 viewers made it to 5 minutes

It is important to keep in mind that these figures were drawn from video sharing sites, rather than academic course content sites, but they nevertheless reinforce the importance of keeping it short.

It is Week 7 of the project, and we are still on schedule.