Challenging Ginsburg: the clicks and mortar route to education

Frances Burton, London Guildhall University

An Internet programme is capable of delivering value in educational terms. It is not simply a means of delivering educational qualifications to the poorer student, but can seriously rival the value of programmes delivered by ‘bricks and mortar’ law schools. Frances Burton encourages all law schools to follow the example of Semple Piggot Rochez (SPR) and go virtual.
US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg provoked a predictable storm when she said in the summer of 1999 that education cannot be achieved without classroom attendance.

Semple Piggot Rochez’s initiative in starting the world’s first totally online law school was at that stage just coming to fruition. Started in 1997, and having survived a pilot first year in 1998-99, it is now in its third year of delivering the London University LLB and the first of delivering the London University LLM. In addition, it now runs the Wolsey Hall distance learning Common Professional Examination (CPE) programme in association with Middlesex University.

SPR’s LLB and LLM courses are based on ten teaching fortnights of four subjects in each year, taught over alternate weekends in two traditional terms, two subjects per weekend, via ‘virtual tutorials’ at alternating times throughout the day to cater for all the world’s time zones.

As there is no building to maintain, this enables a very cost effective fee to be charged to students, who download pre-prepared customised manuals and soundfile lectures, together with worksheets detailing tutorial topics and questions, and periodic assignment questions, in advance for the entire course. There are few permanent staff to pay either, since the high quality specialist lecturers and tutors are recruited from universities around the country to service their own subjects, under the supervision of course directors for each of the courses.

There is an online prospectus for each course, and the courses pulls in a very high quality student profile, consisting of highly motivated people who want to acquire an English law degree. The system means that there is both economic and educational value available online that would otherwise be unavailable to the students who avail themselves of it.

The materials are well supported by the ‘virtual tutorials’, conducted in the website’s chatrooms, of which there are now four, two for LLB and CPE teaching at weekends and one evening a week, and the others for student discussion, tutorial supervision or private study groups. The extra channels mean that if a lecturer or tutor is ill, and cannot even conduct a tutorial on a laptop from his or her sickbed, students can be e-mailed and the tutorial rescheduled with less hassle than re-rooming in university premises.

Students also receive a comprehensive e-mail directory of all their fellow students addresses as well as the tutors. They send in their assignments by e-mail and have them returned duly marked the same way. Finally, there is a face to face revision session in London at the end of the second term for those who want to come for it, and amazingly they do, on short excursion tickets from all five continents.

The CPE programme is slightly different, in that the original Wolsey Hall distance learning course was based round regular face to face study workshops, along the lines subsequently adopted by many postgraduate programmes, and this year a similar fast track programme has been developed for the LLB.

All this certainly an achievement, but that alone would not make this venture remarkable, as anyone can hire good law teachers and get them to provide materials. Around this basic value concept, however, there has now grown a cybercommunity which makes the online law school a reality, started from scratch by SPR but which could be copied by any existing ‘bricks and mortar’ law school diversifying into cyberspace.

The great drawback of distance learning, as Ruth Ginsburg was obviously trying to express, is the loneliness, and the lack of interaction. Well, you can have interaction now with Iolis, and, there are both computer-assisted and computer-based courses all around the country. Leeds, for example, runs one entirely in a virtual building which has not a brick to its name.

In addition to the course, therefore, and some of the best teachers from around the UK universities, what SPR have now got is a whole extra-curricular support system; there is an online student magazine called Consilio with text articles and soundfile discussions, a debate forum, an essay competition, and extra-curricular lectures and interviews with judges and leading practitioners.

Also a law cafe, online bookshop, campus shop where students can access all the usual university services and more, e-mail and telephone support systems, including a weekend messaging service to provide a call back when part time students who are working in their free time need it. There is of course an online library, with no queueing and no shortage of copies of the most used titles, so no short loan collection, book reservation or other normal irritant of limited resources.

It goes without saying that where private sector investment has led, the public sector can now follow much more cost effectively, since many of the problems have now been identified and addressed. In theory, whatever SPR’s London University External Programme can achieve in providing quality distance learning around the world, any UK university can also do.

Even without expensive video conferencing to provide real time audiovisual teaching, which will doubtless come down in price as time goes on, any university law school which now runs degrees which would appeal worldwide could now deliver them in flexible learning mode in the same way that SPR has done, thus providing a wider choice of UK university education than the respected London LLB alone.

Universities which have acknowledged specialisms, such as business law, family law or employment, whether at undergraduate or masters level, can potentially deliver those courses over the Internet, thus widening their catchment area and their appeal, without incurring much extra cost over and above that of their face to face classes, and with the potential for extremely cost effective extra income.

The really cheering aspect is the support the judiciary and leading practitioners have given to SPR’s extra-curricular programme. Lord Woolf inaugurated this programme with an interview in which he answered questions sent in by students on his civil justice reforms, followed by Lord Justice Brooke on contemporary judicial interpretation of statutes, Mrs Justice Hallett on the latest criminal justice issues, and Sir Nicholas Lyell on the role of the Attorney General. Forthcoming interviews include Lord Mackay on legal aid and Lord Bridge on the House of Lords’ practice in overruling itself. Again, any university which offers extra-curricular lectures as part of the student learning experience can replicate this, as with all the other extra-curricular facilities.

The latest development, as in any law school, is CPD, but for SPR this is online, enabling solicitors, all of whom now have to do their hours to gain the points, to download their courses in their own time, instead of losing valuable billable practice time to attend face to face conferences, or send for the papers and hope they work through on their own what was explained to delegates on the spot.

Last Modified: 12 July 2010