Higher education futures: some implications for law teaching

Diana Tribe, University of Hertfordshire

Changes to universities have been faster and more overwhelming during the second half of the 20th century than at any time previously. The postwar change from elite to mass education in the UK and the aims of higher education as reflected in the Dearing Report (1997) underline the current government requirement to provide a higher education system which will support the economy and society at both regional and national levels.

The influence of quality assessment procedures, the Research Assessment Exercise, uncertainties about the future of the teaching and learning process, the need to introduce greater diversity into the higher education system and funding issues have all created uncertainties about the future of higher education. Insofar as legal education is concerned, additional concerns arise from the potentially changing requirements of the professional statutory bodies.

In this short talk I hope to emphasise and consider the implications of these changes for the future of legal education with particular reference to the implications of e-learning with its possible market structures and the new areas of study in 'e-law'.

Recent changes in the way that higher education is supported and funded and the new funding regime which is intended to be in operation will have significant effects upon university education over the next decade. No ceiling will be placed on admissions, as institutions are exhorted to push towards the government's objective of 50% of those under the age of 30 experiencing higher education by 2010. In this 'free market' those institutions that have in the past been threatened by admissions shortfalls will be encouraged to enter into strategic partnerships or collaborations. At the same time universities will be encouraged to continue to promote widening access policies and the concepts of lifelong learning.

There will be preferential funding to support groups who have previously been excluded from higher education opportunities. Meanwhile the strong focus on maintenance of standards will continue, albeit with a significantly changed methodology, for the assessment of quality will be based upon institutional audit rather than on subject reviews. This will emphasise the importance of self assessments and of internal control mechanisms and student completion rates. Students will become increasingly selective in terms of their choice of undergraduate programmes and the university at which they chose to study; league tables, which reflect the employment records of past graduates, are likely to assume a heightened importance in the selection process. As students or their families pay an increasingly large percentage of the overall costs of their education many will seek 'payback' by selecting law degrees which offer electives that relate directly to their career opportunities and earning potential.

Meanwhile, student contribution to fees and to extended loan facilities will affect the relative proportions of students commuting and residential full time students, and it is likely that the tradition of 'going away to university'' will be gradually eroded.

The international student market is also likely to expand significantly. Price Waterhouse Coopers estimate a 300% global increase in numbers accessing higher education by 2020 (figures extrapolated from UNESCO data allowing for population growth).

New opportunities over the next ten years

It is likely therefore that over the next ten years there will be an altered state for higher education, with fresh players entering the market with changed objectives and the possibility of a common curriculum between institutions. The steady increase in the number of 18-21 year old students participating in higher education is likely to change in favour of those students who have in the past been least likely to participate in higher education.

Some new universities which grew very rapidly in size over the past ten years have already begun to suffer a decline in student numbers, whilst the pre 1992 universities have experienced a slower and more steady growth, which has not been affected by a recent general fall in demand in some subject areas. Meanwhile public sector funding to support higher education continues to decline.

It is likely that there will be increased access to the university sector through foundation degrees and new access routes, which will assist the previously under-represented groups to enter higher education.

Economies of scale will be developed through larger groupings of higher education institutions, mergers and strategic partnerships across subject areas; this is likely to be particularly useful in developing the delivery of e-materials.

New geographies will emerge as universities expand to meet changing market opportunities. Just as some world class institutions will become global players, others will embrace a new 'regionalism', focusing on the needs of the 'travel to study' population.

New technology: the managed learning environment and its implications for teaching law

New technology will become central rather than peripheral to higher education, as new e-learning materials are developed. Further change is inevitable, and there is no doubt that technology will play an increasingly important role in the development of law teaching in higher education.

Indeed, the Dearing Report emphasised the need for 'communication and information technology' to be the new framework upon which the 'learning' society will be built, and this is already happening to a greater or lesser extent in the majority of universities. Thus, a seamless environment is beginning to be created for the development of a genuinely distributed learning community for students and for faculty, which improves access to teaching resources, eliminates or reduces constraints due to the time, place and method of instruction and which supports and promotes the preparation of quality instructional content for use with information technology.

By this means, it is argued, there will be a fostering of greater student/teacher interaction and the promotion of greater student engagement wherever students are located. There will also be the opportunity to develop more instructional formats and increase information resources through use of the Web. Given the change in student access to higher education this development could not have occurred at a more appropriate moment. The days when law students regularly and obediently turn up for lecture and seminar classes are already disappearing, and with the present funding arrangements are likely soon to have vanished. In this type of learning environment the managed learning environment is the obvious solution to our future needs.

The traditional lecture or tutorial/seminar is not the only possible approach to the learning experience, and the printed word is no longer the only method of storing legal information. Moreover, with the increasing pressures on space and teaching time and facilities such as law libraries it is important that alternatives to campus based teaching systems are developed. There are now many more mature and overseas students in the higher education system, whilst many nominally full time students are in effect part time since they are forced to engage in part time employment to meet increasing economic pressures. In this environment our goal should be to deliver the total learning experience to students whether they are on or off the campus, local, regionally based or abroad. At the same time what must also be maintained is the overall quality of the law learning experience for all our undergraduates.

What is important however is that we ensure that such a use of computer systems is easy, accommodates all faculty courses and all students and is capable of functioning on several types of computing devices (PC and Mac workstations, but in the longer term PDAs as well).

Principal usage will be for general communications including:

• e-mail to staff and students
• group discussions to create and edit group shared documents and to carry out peer assessment
• Web access
• online tutor support
• peer group support
• support of online learning
• access to learning resources
• assessment and guidance
• links to other systems both internally and externally

Such a system will provide law staff with functions to help with the easy management of courses without requiring major technical expertise; thus staff will be able to manage and customise their course area from work or from home, via a Web browser. Pages will be able to be updated regularly, and no knowledge of HTML will be required either by academic staff or by students.

Course subject content should include:

• lecture notes (with links to Iolis and pointers to other websites containing the full text of cases, statutes and some articles)
• interactive open learning workbooks containing sections of text followed by questions
• computer based simulation games
• assignment and submission dates
• PowerPoint presentations used to support lectures
• videos of lectures
• case studies
• past examination papers
• reading lists (amended as appropriate)
• library connections with full text materials
• assignments and assessment - the electronic submission and return of assignments can be made available in a secure environment with an automatic date/time stamp, with options for late submission. Teaching staff will be able to monitor student progress by setting formative and summative assignments.
• computer based assessment may also be possible, together with a database of questions for subsequent re-use and summary of students' answers using software such as Question Mark and/or Lotus Notes
• sophisticated online discussion forum

The devil is of course in the detail, and as matters currently stand student fees are inadequate to meet all the costs of a faculty that will need to release the necessary academic and technical staff time to convert courses that can be offered solely by student directed study and/or distance learning. In addition, the cost of the necessary technical and librarian support, together with the hardware and software purchase costs, means that these are issues that have to be tackled institutionally rather than at faculty level.

However, it should be remembered that even if academic staff are not computer and information literate, most students are. Moreover students have become very appreciative of 'zero seat time' courses, which fit in so much better with their employment activities. It is the academic staff who prefer formal lecturing rather than the students, it would appear.

These kinds of technological developments mean that students can learn at their own pace and review the content of a course until they completely understand the subject matter. They can interact with other students to their combined benefit, and they can work from home or from work.

Implications of new methods for legal study

The use of the Internet for student research at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels as well as for communication purposes means that students can already benefit from the work of legal experts around the world, with the necessarily enriching effect that this has on the information readily available. Academic staff will have more flexibility in carrying out teaching commitments, which can be done 'long distance', rather than solely on site. Supervision of dissertations no longer requires a supervisor at his/her desk; indeed supervision can now be carried out from around the world as students e-mail attachments of the most recent chapter to their supervisor.

Websites such as Westlaw and Open.gov.uk (now incorporated into UKonline) give standard information on legislation and judicial decisions in an easily and rapidly connected form. The need for large law libraries with heavy volumes of text is becoming less, as more and more information is made available to students electronically and at a distance from the university campus.

The downside of this development however is the ever increasing problem of plagiarism; no academic lawyer can be unaware of the extent to which students can (and do) download information to form a part of an undergraduate dissertation. Possession of a credit card means that law students can easily e-mail problem questions to a provider, who for £35 will e-mail back an appropriate answer. Whilst staff may suspect the authorship of some of this material, it is almost impossible to identify its source. This, together with the increased willingness of the courts to consider academic decisions not as professional judgements but rather as procedural matters based not on human rights but rather on fairness at common law, has given rise to a number of collateral attacks of academic judgement which need careful consideration in the light of materials currently available to students on the Internet.

Moreover through the use of Internet based resources students may eventually suffer from 'information overload', a problem that generates 'surface' rather than 'deep' learning strategies.

The Web is not necessarily free, nor is it universally available. It is argued that it is still not easily navigated, and it is certainly true that not all information made available is censored or refereed; navigation around the Internet depends upon the student hoping that some information exists rather than actually knowing that it does.

Meanwhile law libraries are faced with the ever increasing problem of whether to replace hard copy with electronic media in terms of cost and space and librarian time. Whilst computer based material does not replace books or journals, it does undoubtedly have the potential to meet the needs of staff and students who are faced with increasing pressures of time and funds.

New approaches to law teaching on professional legal education programmes

Richard Susskind has stated that "whilst most of the work of today's lawyer is advisory and consultative in nature, the emphasis will shift radically in the information society as many lawyers assume the role of legal information engineer and devote much of their professional lives to the design and development of legal information services and products" (The future of law: facing the challenges of information technology Oxford: Clarendon 1996).

Thus it is that students on the Legal Practice Course will need to have developed the necessary IT skills as an integral part of their training, as employers will undoubtedly expect graduates to be able to operate computer technology in the practice of law.

Students' IT skills should therefore be audited on entry to facilitate the appropriate personal development in basic computing skills. The facilities and options available in the professions should be listed, and new entrants should be required to indicate the extent to which they have experience of their use. Initially they should be able to communicate with colleagues and with clients via e-mail and be able to save mail effectively.

They should then learn to use the basic hardware and software currently in use in the legal profession, for example Sweet & Maxell's Current Legal Information databases, the Index to Legal Periodicals, Lexis and .

Similarly the use of databases such as Jordan's Family Finance Toolkit, Laserform and the Land Registry are all essential. Students should also be able to operate the Internet in order to access general source materials as a basis for research. They should have experience of retrieving data from CD-ROMs such as UK Statutory Instruments, and perhaps they should also include as part of their programme of study modules which take into account recent developments in the market place which affect Internet law, e-commerce, telecommunications law and the drafting and negotiating of IT contracts.

Partner and franchise universities/colleges

Although many universities have historically been linked with external institutions that have become local providers (for example associate and overseas colleges), they have continued to be the prime providers of higher education. In the past they have been located within a local community, and it is likely that the 'new universities' will continue to be linked in this way. As finance declines so students are more likely to study from home, and at the same time the principle of lifelong learning will become more prevalent as employers require their staff to update their skills and qualifications and look to local universities to provide the necessary training.

The effect of technology on the development of overseas and home partnerships with other colleges and universities could be considerable. A new format of market channel structure for law teaching at undergraduate level may well develop, where the traditional nature of students registered and enrolled at the host university may be underwritten by the brand of a partner university or college providing additional quality assurance comfort for the student as well as the brand strength of the provider.

Possible strategies include the following links:

• university to student
• university to franchise college
• university to portal to student
• university to agent to student
• university to university to student

The university would act as the centre of excellence, from which the necessary intellectual resources could be drawn to support on-site teaching and learning activities. In these circumstances workbook material, lectures, online seminars, assignments and even examinations could be carried out electronically regardless of distance. The effect of this on university costs would be beneficial; no longer would academic staff find themselves making lengthy and time consuming visits to sites in China, India and Malaysia, when necessary administrative and scholarly activity could be carried out using material developed for transmission via the Internet through the University's academic portal.

Conclusion

There are many issues that still need to be addressed in order to ensure that the use of technology as an integral part of the teaching learning environment maintains the necessary quality.

• in many universities there is still a shortage of workstations and problems in accessing the university portal at vital times of the day and week
• there remains a need to engender the necessary cultural change in the minds of many academic staff who fear the effect of technology on job security and 'old skills'
• resourcing the cost involved in the preparation of databanks of materials to support student learning
• the time and cost of retraining academic staff to make best use of the new facilities available
• the cost of permanent technical support both at institutional and faculty levels
• the duplication of effort and expenditure between institutions
• disseminating the results of e-based learning more widely
• audit of UK expertise in law faculties