Putting the student centre: using technology to enhance student learning and increase accessibility to professional development courses for the legal profession

Like all professionals, legal practitioners are using a proliferating number of mobile devices to integrate personal and professional information and in doing so continue to blur the lines between work and private time. It is... [ view full abstract ]

Like all professionals, legal practitioners are using a proliferating number of mobile devices to integrate personal and professional information and in doing so continue to blur the lines between work and private time. It is incumbent on legal professional development course providers to mirror how technology is used in work and in the private lives of such professionals. Accessibility to content “on the move” is one of the key factors in providing post-qualification and continuing professional development courses for busy practitioners who work full-time. However, when attempting to increase accessibility there is a danger that technology in education is implemented for technology’s sake, and that not enough thought is given to designing courses that use it to facilitate more effective ways of learning that are student centred. This presentation describes how the Law Society’s Diploma Centre has used a number of technological initiatives, including blended learning, iPads, and a customised webcasting facility, to help deliver a broad range of post professional courses. We describe how these innovations have increased the accessibility of our courses from a geographical perspective, allowing practitioners from throughout the jurisdiction to attend. However, the use of technology has also increased accessibility from a temporal perspective, in that such ‘time-poor’ practitioners can choose how and when to access course materials. We attempt to evaluate our success in this regard by drawing on relevant literature, for example Garrison’s Community of Inquiry Model, and also by analysing the extensive student data and student feedback received from practitioners attending our courses over the last five years.

Freda Grealy, Law Society of Ireland
Rory O’Boyle, Law Society of Ireland

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