2020 Professional Legal Education Conference Recordings Now Available

Professor Nick James

On 1-3 October 2020, the Centre for Professional Legal Education proudly hosted the very first Professional Legal Education conference. The plenary presentations and individual Livestream presentations were delivered entirely online and watched live by an audience of 200+ attendees from across Australia and around the world. The goal of the conference was to take steps toward harmonising legal education by bringing together law teachers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, law societies, regulators, and others to engage in discussions about how law is taught in Australia and elsewhere, and in that regard the conference was a success. All of the feedback we have received has been extremely positive, and we are delighted by the level of collegial engagement with the conference from across both the academy and the profession in Australia and internationally.

We are very pleased to announce that recordings of the plenary presentations and most of the individual Livestream presentations are now freely available via the CPLE website.

Whether or not you were able to attend the Conference, you can now access recordings of a wide array of accomplished legal educators, experienced legal practitioners and esteemed legal scholars speaking on a variety of engaging topics.

Highlights include:

• The Plenary Lecture by Dr Colin James on ‘Trauma, Stigma and Compassionate Engagement: The Need for Reform in Legal Education, Training and Practice’
• The Plenary Debate about the topic ‘‘You had one job!’: Law schools are failing at preparing graduates for practice’ with Luke Murphy (President, QLS), Ann-Maree David (Executive Director, College of Law) and Matthew Roach (Director, Parampara) for the affirmative and Assistant Professor Tanya Atwill (Director, Bond GDLP Program), Professor Sally Kift (President, Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows) and Michael Lavarch (former Dean of Law, QUT) for the negative.
• The Plenary Panel discussion of the topic ‘Is legal education in Australia over-regulated or under-regulated?’ by Emeritus Professor Sandford Clark (Former Chair, LACC),    Professor Lesley Hitchens (Chair, CALD), Professor Alex Steel (Director Teaching Strategy, UNSW), Associate Professor Kate Galloway (Editor-in-Chief, Legal Education Review) and Professor Caroline Strevens (Academy Chair, Association of Law Teachers (UK))
• The Plenary Public lecture by Dr Rajesh K Reddy on ‘The Rise of Animal Law Education: A Discipline Whose Time Is Now’.

You can also access 40 individual presentations on:

• Being a Law Teacher
• Inclusion, Feelings and Hope
• Law and Art
• Mentoring
• Past, Present and Future
• Teaching in the Digital Era
• Teaching New Law Students
• Teaching Professionalism
• Teaching Responsibility
• Teaching Skills
• The Big Picture
• Wellbeing

We encourage you to take the time to visit the CPLE website and take a look at what is available.

The success of the Conference would not have been possible without the support of our partners (the Bond University Faculty of Law, Voiceless, the Law Wellness Network, and the Australasian Law Academic Association (ALAA)), the chairs, the attendees, our colleagues, and the presenters, and for that we are extremely grateful. We are also grateful for the support of our IT partner Encore Event Technologies who provided such an innovative and engaging online conference environment.

The second Professional Legal Education Conference will take place at Bond University in 2022. We look forward to seeing you then.

Professor Nick James and Professor Rachael Field

CPLE Directors

Preparing to Teach Remotely (Part 2): Designing Assessment Tasks

Professor Nick James

Last week I began describing my efforts to prepare for remote teaching next semester: I will be coordinating the new subject Enterprise Law, a compulsory subject in Bond University’s new Transformation degrees including the Bachelor of Legal Transformation. My first step was to engage with a broad overview of remote teaching. (Since that post, my colleague Tory Baumfield has drawn my attention to this excellent article, written specifically for law teachers struggling with the transition to remote teaching, and which I strongly encourage you to read if you are not sure where to begin.) I then thought carefully about my learning outcomes, and whether they remain suitable in a remote teaching context.

This week my focus will be upon ensuring the assessment I will be administering in my subject is appropriate, rigorous and aligned with my learning outcomes. This final point is important: as explained last week, the notion of constructive alignment tells us that the assessment tasks we give our students should evaluate the extent to which the students have achieved the learning outcomes we set for the subject. If I have stated a learning outcome but I don’t assess it, or if I have an assessment task that measures something other than a learning outcome, I really should reconsider either the learning outcomes or the assessment task.

Remote teaching will prevent me from using some forms of assessment I have used in the past, but it is also encouraging me to adopt other forms of assessment, some of which may on reflection be more suitable and better aligned with my learning outcomes. They may also be more authentic. One of the more traditional types of assessment used in the discipline of law – the invigilated, handwritten, closed-book examination – prioritises the integrity of the assessment process and challenges the students to demonstrate their understanding of the subject in quite difficult conditions, but it lacks authenticity in that it is difficult to imagine circumstances in which the students will be required to complete a similar task – hand-writing a legal advice in only a couple of hours without access to resource materials – in ‘real life’. A ‘take home’ exam delivered online, where the students have a longer period to complete the task and can access their notes, the textbook and any online resources, certainly raises concerns about integrity and rigour (which can be addressed), but it is more authentic in that it more closely replicates the kind of task they might be asked to undertake in their professional lives.

In choosing appropriate assessment tasks, I want to ensure I use a combination of formative and summative assessment tasks. A formative assessment task is one with the principal objective of enhancing student understanding; marks for the task may or may not contribute to the final grade for the subject. It might be a quiz, the marks for which don’t ‘count’, or it might even be as simple as asking oral questions of my students in class. A summative assessment task, on the other hand, has the principal objective of evaluating student understanding or competence; marks for the task will contribute to the final grade for the subject. It is the summative assessment tasks that are my focus at this stage.

I have expressed the learning outcomes for my subject as:

1. Explain and critique the law regulating enterprises in Australia, including tort law, contract law, consumer protection and competition regulation, IP law and business law
2. Communicate their knowledge of the legal system and enterprise law effectively and appropriately, in writing and verbally
3. Identify, analyse and solve authentic legal problems, taking into consideration their ethical dimensions

I would normally build assessment tasks around these learning outcomes as follows:

• An interim assessment task that requires the students to keep up to date with the material as it is presented, challenges them to think critically about the material, and tests their understanding of both basic and advanced concepts, e.g. a mid-semester test.
• Class participation tasks that require the students to participate regularly in class discussions and demonstrate their understanding of the material orally, e.g. tutorial participation marks.
• A final assessment task that requires the students to synthesise what they have learned in the subject and apply their understanding to solving complex legal and ethical problems, e.g. a final exam.

I don’t need to throw these out and start again. I can retain my broad categories of assessment task, but the way I administer them will change in the online environment.

• Interim assessment: A mid-semester test can of course be administered online. But I am no longer obligated to administer all of the questions at once. I could instead set up a series of online tests that assess student understanding as it is taught. I might have three mini-tests during the semester. The extreme example is a series of online tests, administered each week of the semester, where I assess concepts from that week. The questions could be well-designed MCQs (which can be marked automatically), complex problems, or anything in between. In my subject I am going to set weekly online tests worth a total of 30% of the final mark, each test comprising a combination of MCQs and short answer questions. It will take some work up front to create a bank of good quality questions, but that effort will pay off during the semester with a reduced marking load.
• Class participation: If I am teaching my classes online, I should still be able to assess student participation in class. There are however some additional challenges to be taken into account. Does the platform allow me to ‘see’ all of my students? What if a student has a technical difficulty and cannot attend or participate? What if the class is too large for me to easily evaluate student performance online? I may need to provide an alternative ‘channel’ for students to demonstrate that they have met the relevant learning outcome, e.g. an a synchronous discussion board where students can post a written contribution or a short video. In my subject, I will allocate 10% of the final mark to participation. The classes will be small enough for me to assess student participation using a good marking rubric, but I will also give my students the option of posting a short video answer to that week’s tutorial exercise on the subject discussion board.
• Final assessment: As previously stated, I can replace my normal end-of semester invigilated, handwritten examination with a take-home examination where the students have 24 hours to complete the task and submit their work via the subject website. This will require me to think very carefully about the questions I set. I don’t want to give them a task where they can easily Google the answers. The classic legal problem used in law schools is well suited to this task. Provided it is a relatively novel problem, the students will not be able to find the answer online. I am however conscious of not making the final assessment task unnecessarily stressful, particularly during what is already a very stressful time. I’m also mindful of my own marking load at what will be a very hectic end of semester period. I would normally weight the final task at 60% (relatively high compared to other disciplines but still much less than Law’s traditional 100% final exam). I now think 40% would be more appropriate, and I can ‘move’ the other 20% to earlier in the semester by setting a legal problem similar to what the students would ordinarily do on the exam, but require them to complete it and submit their answer much earlier. This will also allow me to identify problems with their problem solving ability sooner, and provide them with useful feedback about how they can improve.

Once I have settled my assessment regime, I need to make sure I am clear with my students about my expectations regarding their performance. I need to ensure that at the very minimum I provide my students with:

• a brief description of each assessment task;
• the marks and weighting allocated to each assessment task;
• the due date for each assessment task; and
• the subject learning outcomes aligned with each assessment task.

It is also helpful if I provide my students with additional assessment information, including:

• a detailed description (including word limits) of each assessment task;
• submission instructions (including deadlines, how to submit online, and penalties for late submission) or examination conditions (e.g. duration, closed book/open book) for each assessment task;
• the marking criteria for each assessment task;
• the dates students can expect each assessment task to be marked and feedback provided;
• the form that feedback will take (e.g. written feedback, oral feedback, etc);
• the penalties for exceeding word limits;
• the process of applying for extensions;
• late submission penalties; and
• any policy regarding student appeals of assessment results.

Some of this information will be included in the subject outline, but it will be helpful if all of it is clearly set out on my subject website.

Next week: Choosing appropriate learning activities. Meanwhile don’t forget to check the CPLE’s list of remote teaching resources.

CPLE releases library of previously unavailable legal education resources

Ian Edwards – Manager, Law Library, Bond University

In 2017 the Centre for Professional Legal Education (CPLE) at Bond University merged with the Centre for Legal Education (CLE), formerly based at the University of Technology Sydney and later Western Sydney University. The CLE was originally established in 1992 and in its early years was extremely active, engaging in some important and impactful projects including studies into the career intentions of law students and the career destinations of law graduates. The CPLE inherited the CLE’s business name, its goodwill, and a set of legal education resources.

This post discusses the activities undertaken by Library Services and the Law Library at Bond to facilitate access, raise awareness and enhance the discoverability of these resources, and thereby make a valuable contribution to law teaching and legal education scholarship in Australasia.

There were approximately 250 titles transferred from the CLE’s legal education collection and the first step was to divide these into two manageable collections: the first, a miscellany of reports, papers, pamphlets and journals numbering approximately 100 titles, and the second, a collection of roughly 150 monographs relating to legal education.

An initial analysis of the collection was undertaken to determine which resources, if any, had previously been digitized and were available online.

From the analysis it was discovered that:

• 38 titles were not recorded in Trove;
• 27 titles were held by fewer than 10 libraries in Australia;
• 11 titles were held by only a small number of libraries in Australia;
• 9 titles were already held by Bond University, or a later edition of the title; and
• 11 titles were duplicate titles.

The review confirmed the value of these resources, making an important contribution to the available body of literature on legal education, including 38 previously uncatalogued works. Many of these works are of considerable historical significance, including:

• Christopher Roper, Career Intentions of Australian Law Students (1995)
• Gordon Joughin, A Framework for Teaching and Learning Law (1996)
• Mark Wojcik, Introduction to Legal English: An Introduction to Legal Terminology, Reasoning, and Writing in Plain English (1998)
• Phillip Jones, Competences, Learning Outcomes and Legal Education (1994)
• William Duncan, Skills Training (1991)

The full list of legal education resources can be accessed HERE.

Excluding titles already held, the remaining items were added to the Bond University Library collection and in the process, bibliographic records were uploaded to the National Library of Australia’s Trove database.  With Trove a go to location for researchers, this significantly increases the likelihood of these items being discovered by researchers, law teachers, legal education historians and others.  Accessibility of these resources is also improved through institutional resource sharing schemes. 

During the cataloguing process, a general notes field was added to the record identifying the item as belonging to the Centre for Professional Legal Education (CPLE).  This was necessary to manage the items as a single collection, a requirement when creating the digital collection.

The Library’s digital collections provide a quick and easy means of viewing the collection in its entirety.  Once an item is selected from the collection it opens the record in library search which provides bibliographic information, the location of the item and for authorised users a quick means of requesting the item. Other users are presented with the necessary information to make a resource sharing request through their institutional library.

The Library Search record also provides two virtual bookshelves. The first displays similar legal education resources, and the other a complete view of the Legal Education Library collection.  These resources can now be searched individually through Bond Library search and Trove. They are accessible through the Library’s collections page and can also be found in the resources section of the CPLE website.

The Library Services teams involved in this work included the Information Resources team, the Digital Library Systems and Services team and the Law Library team.