As a current 2nd year Scots Law student at the University of Dundee, I have been participating in lectures and assessment for my course entirely online. Online law classes have been, and remain, a controversial idea, but the coronavirus pandemic (at least temporarily) has meant students of all disciplines, including legal studies, have been forced to move teaching and any assessments entirely online. I want to reflect on my own experiences studying law online with the University of Dundee and examine my hopes for how this will impact legal courses in the future. Firstly, however, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to all the university and college staff working hard in a very difficult situation to ensure we all still receive our educations and feel as supported and confident as possible in our academic requirements, my lecturers have all been amazing during this unsure time and for that, I cannot thank them enough.
Lectures and Teaching Materials
Following the ceasure of in-person teaching, my university’s law department took a short break from lectures in order to set up and plan for online resources. My lecturers primarly chose to deliver content via a Microsoft Powerpoint with imbedded audio files of the lecturer discussing and expanding on slide content. One of my course modules was entirely online already so remained unchanged, another simply released the existing powerpoints and resources for additional information on the content. Students could ask questions or discuss course content through a discord server, although this did not seem particularly popular, the presence of this resource was a nice safety net and the level of usage was realistically reflective of how often students ask questions during lectures.
The powerpoints with embedded audio files were a useful source of information and definitely an improvement to the entirely written notes I had expected. Although I feel information was harder to retain than an in-person class and I missed the structure that traditional lectures give, I appreciated the ability to relisten to concepts I found more difficult or were attempting to review. I also found lecturers gave more concise and clearer explanations than they would in a traditional lecture likely due to the ability to rerecord the audio files as many times as necessary.
Although I missed the experience of in-person teaching and felt that structure and my ability to retain information suffered for lack of it, these audio files were an amazing resource that I believe would greatly benefit the law school to be used in conjunction with traditional lectures in the future. Using these to highlight and reiterate key points, allowing for better review of topics and access to content that was missed. This would be particularly helpful for students with commitments outside of their control that would prevent them from attending lectures, they would not be hampered as significantly simply for not having the advantages of other students. Additionally, those with learning disabilities would benefit greatly from the ability to review information in a way they can finetune to best suit their needs, e.g. removing the distractions of other students. I have often heard concerns that content being available online in this way would encourage students not to attend lectures (believing they can later refer to the online resource, making the in-person lectures obsolete). Although I can understand this concern, I posit it is unwise to penalise those working hard to do well in difficult situations beyond their control, in order to force those who would choose to be apathetic while sitting in a privileged position to put in the minimum effort required of them.
Assessment
Courses were assessed in a variety of ways: one used a multiple-choice quiz, others reweighed the grade distribution or content of assignments and another issued a written exam. I am writing this previous to results being released in order to remain as unbiased as possible to the experience of being examined in this way.
Of the assignments, these allowed for the testing to be less of a memory game or assessment of the student’s examination ability and more of a test of overall legal understanding. I can also see how this form of assessment could be more beneficial to those with demanding outside commitments. Although there were some issues with repeated changes in the requirements and overall guidance (I’ll admit I shed a few tears when a significant update was made to the requirements and guidance for an assignment I had been working on for about a month) which were frustrating and confusing, this seemed to be more a product of these being an unexpectedly significant portion of our grades that was being updated as they were already live as opposed to a fault in the concept of an assessed assignment.
The online multiple-choice quiz was issued in an online module already intended to be assessed in this way so worked well and was a good way to assess simple knowledge. Although this did not examine understanding of the course content, it was an appropriate method of examination for the module. However, the usual issues with multiple choice questionnaires still exist in this method: there could be points simply for guessing, only surface level knowledge can be confidently assessed and often wording or options being ‘technically’ correct or incorrect can make the question confusing or even penalise a student for knowing more about the subject than the question expects and not allowing for clarification (although this did not cause an issue in the exam I took, this has been an issue in previous MCQs).
The exam was released for 12 hours and expected to be submitted in this time frame, a word count and additional expectations of information and referencing were given. Some of the assessed topics had not been covered in lectures but were mandatory for assessment, this was frustrating but unavoidable and lecturers had put in their best efforts to give resources in order to prevent this being an issue. Again, I appreciated this was less of a test for memory or how well students can complete tests than traditional exams and the large time frame allowed those with children, job commitments etc. to carry those out and still be able to complete the exam. However, a blanket word count was given for all social sciences exams based on the time given for that exam. I can’t speak to how useful this was for other subjects, but I found the tight word requirement limited my ability to be concise and give additional information that students are generally encouraged to give. I understand why a word count was necessary, but I would have appreciated the wordcount being based on the individual exam as opposed to a blanket rule informed by usual time limits. I found that I had written about 4000 words of the 2000 word limit exam, although a lot of this was superfluous and easily edited within the time limit, I felt by the end I was forced to get rid of some information and sacrifice the clarity expected of a law exam. Additionally, some of the guidance seemed unclear and although lecturers tried very hard to clarify, it became obvious that nobody fully understood how the work was to be assessed, what was expected etc. This was frustrating and confusing at the time but understandable as this was the first time an exam was carried out using this method and were it to be repeated with more warning, I can imagine a lot of these issues being less prominent than the system was during Covid.
I can also see concerns of academic dishonesty across these assessment methods as they lack a reliable moderation method to prevent this. This is a particular issue with the multiple-choice test which doesn’t require understanding, only knowledge. Additionally, due to the structure of the online exam, I can see that with enough practice and knowledge of how the exam would operate, practice answers could easily be written that could be simply pasted into the paper and a few details changed (although I don’t think this was a significant issue this year, with prior knowledge of how these exams operated, I can imagine this would become more prevalent).
Final Thoughts
Firstly, I want to commend the individuals that worked hard to implement these methods for teaching and assessment in such a stressful and unsure time, much of which was done within an incredibly tight timeframe and was unlike anything they have undertaken before. I understand these alternate methods were necessary and regardless of any issues with these systems, represented an attempt to continue student’s ability to access their academics and education.
Within lectures and the distribution of teaching materials and resources, in-person lectures were missed but I saw significant benefit and promise in the imbedded audio files which I would love to see be implemented into the more traditional course to make information more accessible and allow for improved methods of catching up with missed course materials.
In regard to assessments, many of the disadvantages I experienced would become less impactful as the methods became more standard and guidance, method etc. more established. The issue of academic dishonesty remains one that causes unease and uncertainty, however, with more effective methods of digital moderation, this too could be addressed. Additionally, it could be that this more open book method, focused more on understanding and application of law than the memorisation of various case law, statutes and dictum is arguably more applicable to the modern-day practice of law. I am reminded of the oft cited maths teacher quote – “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”. Following the widespread nature of the mobile phone, this simply isn’t true, therefore it makes more sense to teach equations and how to apply them than focusing on manual methods for complex formula (arguably unimportant when the majority of the population have a supercomputer in their pocket). Similarly, it may make sense to shift the focus of legal study towards the application of law rather than simply memorisation of details, online testing would be an effective way of assessing this type of ability.
Any mistakes, innaccuracies or misrepresentations are entirely my own error for which I take sole responsibility and will rectify upon becoming aware of the situation.
Rachel Lawson – I am a 2nd year Scots Law student at the University of Dundee, the 2019 recipient of the Harold How memorial award (for most meritorious first year law student) and have an avid interest in how the legal field will develop in the coming years and technology’s impact on this.
Law, Technology and Innovation 