What are the learning and teaching issues?

• designing content for legal education should be driven by sound principles of learning and not by the available technology
• a very useful rule of thumb during the design process is to ask the question “What do I want the students to do?” Simply loading lecture notes into a study web only partly deals with this question. Just reading the notes can be a very passive process. Encouraging students to work with the notes is far better practice and, with judicious selection of activities and questions, is far more likely to motivate students into deeper modes of study.
• look for ‘coherence’, ie that the outcomes, content, learning and teaching strategy and assessment cohere each with the other. There are endless examples of the lack of such coherence, including an outcome of “the students will be able to critically evaluate…” but assessment questions being designed only to test memorisation.
• one of the most important things about learning is what the student already knows. Students are very rarely empty vessels waiting to be filled with course materials. They will have experiences of their own, and these will influence the way in which they learn the content of the course. Indeed, if the students can recount these experiences they can often add much value to the course. Telling others about the experiences via a discussion forum also enables the students to learn from each other. Questions designed to elicit this kind of student activity have been shown to be great motivators.
• each unit of the course could begin with a list of what the student should already know before commencing that study. This enables students to revisit their prior learning to ensure they have understood what is necessary before moving on to the current study. Hypertext links could be made to the previous material for easy access for students who need to revisit it.
• when ‘seeding’ questions for discussion (see question 9) consider (if appropriate) the kind of employment the students have. Problem-type questions that draw upon employment experience can encourage deep learning.
• there are various ways in which students can be persuaded to interact with the uploaded materials. Help the students in the construction of their own learning by designing or uploading both pre-fabricated material, ie factual resources, and other features to encourage individual or group responses.
• try listing common pitfalls in getting to grips with your subject and give students the option of looking at these before commencing the study. These would be drawn from your own experience of common misunderstandings amongst students. An example of ‘frequently occurring misunderstandings’ from a Duty of Care web is shown below.

Example of a frequently occuring misunderstanding

• include questions or activities within the materials for students to work on. Feedback can be given via the glossary function of the VLE, although for some questions, for example those where there are various perspectives, you may want the students to make postings to the discussion forum.
• questions of particular value will be those that draw together learning from past study with new learning (synthesis: How does economic duress affect the need for consideration in a contract?); questions that pose real life problems and ask the student to apply potential solutions (problem-based learning: How could clinical negligence claims be better resolved?); issues-based questions that ask the student to evaluate various viewpoints (critical evaluation: Explain two arguments for and two against strict liability offences)
• make hypertext links to other relevant websites relevant to the study, such as electronic law reports, statutes and journals. Activities or questions could be based upon the linked material, with the same options on feedback from and to students.
• some students will want to ‘surf’ for other apparently relevant websites. Consider telling them how to discern the good sites from the bad and the downright ugly.
• construct diagrams, tables and charts, but with missing features. Students can then be asked to complete the missing elements and post their suggestions to the discussion forum.
• give raw data or uncategorised information and ask the student, or groups, to construct diagrams, tables or charts

Last Modified: 4 June 2010