Here are a few observations after participating in the second annual UK Conference on Legal Education on January 3rd and 4th of 2008:
1. In Sync…. The legal education instructors in the UK share our issues and concerns regarding the future of legal education. In a plenary presentation by a well-known Australian professor, the Best Practices and Carnegie Foundation reports were mentioned as part of world-wide efforts to “modernize” legal education.
2. Feedback and Delivery. The British schools use a large number of tutorials to deliver education to their students, including those placed on video as i-tutorials. One looming issue was how to provide individualized feedback, particularly in pass/fail environments. This was similar to assessment issues in the United States — we often look at assessment as comprising a single summative final exam, without effective formative feedback.
3. Learning Environments. A related issue involved learning environments for the 21st Century law student. In Britain, the use of tutorials has “decentralized” the learning environment. From lap-tops in the classrooms to the use of technology advances, the United States is struggling with similar pressures to adapt the delivery of legal education. My colleague, Catherine Dunham, co-presented on the use of different learning environments for the 21st Century law student and reflected similar concerns raised by British instructors. (One presentation by a British instructor involved a critique of an elaborate i-tutorial program.) Given studies and plentiful anecdotal evidence showing that our current law students learn from a variety of multi-media sources, we should meet the students at those sources through pod casts and other such environments, rather than stick to a 20th Century notion of classroom space as the sole learning environment (excepting clinical course offerings).