Using SIMPLE at the University of Glamorgan law school

Case study on the use of the SIMPLE application in the law school at the University of Glamorgan, one of five law schools participating in UKCLE’s SIMPLE project

If you would like to know more about the use of SIMPLE at Glamorgan contact Karen Counsell on kmcounse@glam.ac.uk.

Update: Evaluating SIMPLE’s accessibility – in August 2008 the law school received funding from the JISC TechDis HEAT scheme to examine accessibility and inclusion issues raised in using SIMPLE. Find out more in the project report.

Glamorgan used SIMPLE in the Torts module of the first year of the law degree during 2007-08. The simulation was an adversarial transaction based on the personal injury simulation used at Glasgow Graduate School of Law (see the GGSL case study for further information), with adjustments made to accommodate the differences between Scots and English law and the academic nature of the module.

The class of 120 was split into firms of four. The students had allocated lab time where they could get assistance from a member of staff qualified in both law and IT.

The transaction was built by a lecturer with a background in both law and multimedia, but with little experience of e-learning or simulations. Two other lecturers took on roles within the simulation and were responsible for a number of pairs of firms each.

Building the simulation

The creation of the concept diagrams to support the building of the simulation (known as narrative event diagrams, or NEDs) was in part a frustrating experience, as there were quite a few crashes when uploading blueprints. Creating the resources and associating them with the NED also took a great deal of time and effort. In conclusion, the process of building the simulation should have started earlier, however despite the workload being heavier than anticipated the job of building the simulation did not take time away from any other activity.

Running the simulation

The dull colour of the interface and the lack of email within the software came as a surprise. The intention had been to run some websites alongside the SIMPLE environment, however the software to create these sites was not offered by the university and it was too costly for the departmental budget. As a result some of the richness of simulation was lost.

A further issue was hosting. At the time the simulation was set up there were no hosting facilities at Glamorgan, so it was hosted by Glasgow Graduate School of Law, however internal hosting arrangements have now been made.

General comments

The main expectations prior to commencing the project were that SIMPLE would improve students’ legal knowledge, IT and other skills. This was the case for some students at least – there was a noticeable improvement on the previous year’s results for the module, with more students completing successfully and an overall increase of 10% in both coursework and examination results. Students responded well to pressure and liked the constant feedback. They also responded well to role play and expected fast turnaround of documents.

One of the main benefits was the ability to provide ‘detached’ feedback. SIMPLE allows the lecturer to role play in whichever character s/he happens to be playing at the time, meaning that feedback is not as emotionally charged as exchanges between teacher and student can be.

SIMPLE was also useful from the point of view of assessment – the external examiner was given access to the system in order to view student work.

One downside was that when something went wrong it was not always easy to alert students to this or to fix the mistake – posting a correction to an electronic notice board did not always reach the desired number of students. There was a further issue when the lecturer leading the module went abroad for a week, as those who took over were not always able to deal with the problems which arose.

At various points during the simulation there were problems releasing documents because of mistakes and the erratic progress of some students – not all of them were consistent in their approach to deadlines.

The future

Glamorgan is continuing to use SIMPLE. Their advice to future SIMPLE users is to keep detailed records and to be very specific about what students have to submit as assessed work, an issue which also arose in student feedback.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010