Case study: Enhancing in-person learning opportunities by using recorded media

York Law School
Scott Slorach

Scott Slorach describes how current approaches to learning in a first year skills module in the Law School have been shaped by resources and activities developed during the remote teaching phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to the pandemic, learning activities on the module were built around an introductory plenary session at the start of each block of the module, followed by a workshop providing opportunities for practice, reflection and feedback. During the pandemic, the introductory plenary was replaced by online resources built on short video recordings.

The continued use of these resources has allowed for a plenary session to be re-introduced, but this is now used at the end of each block for consolidation, reflection and feed-forward activities. This is serving to increase the overall number of learning points during each block of the module and to increase the load of active rather than passive learning.

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Transcript

Legal Skills first year module where students develop skills of case analysis, interviewing, writing, negotiation, advocacy. Team building. And they are given guidance in plenaries in our our pre-COVID model, very much a tell-show-do model, guidance as to how to carry out the skill, some demonstrations and short activities in the large group session and then a classic practice feedback, and then we ask them to reflect because they're assessed eventually in a reflective portfolio where they pretend their negotiation plans, interview plans, notes of feedback, and then they reflect against standard modules of skills.

When we went online, basically we replicated that and converted a number of the short activities into VLE activities. So for example, editing sentences, saying things in fewer words and so on for legal, legal writing, extracts, putting together question plans for interviews and so on. And then we had our workshops online using breakout rooms for skills practices.

Basically what we've done now is, is to enhance the number of active learning points for students. So we've retained everything that we taught online. We've retained the workshops. Now what we're doing is, rather than the plenaries coming in at the start, they're coming in after, they’re coming in at the tail of the skills cycle. And this means that students have got, thinking about gapped learning, a period of time to think about their experience, the feedback they've got, on the personal sections and the experience, they can then ask questions in the plenary. We can provide guidance and critical reflection, by that I mean having had the skills experience, we can then point them to further research sources on models and theories of skills so they can do more detailed analysis of their experience and putting the two of these things together, because students will do each skill at least twice within the module, we can effectively provide, if you like, more feedforward to enhance the, that they can apply to their next skills performance when they have that subsequent practice.

So, basically it's using online resources to increase the number of learning points and to increase the overall load of active learning, which, as we all know, is far better than passive learning. Done.