Taking Clinical Legal Education Online, a workshop from The Open University

@OpenUniversity and @OU_OpenJustice online workshop to teach clinical legal education online

The Open University Law School’s Open Justice team @OU_OpenJustice is holding a 90-minute online workshop designed to advise industry colleagues who suddenly find themselves needing to teach clinical legal education online.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting UK lockdown, interest in online learning has peaked. Other universities around the country which are less experienced in online learning than the OU, and use traditional face-to-face teaching methods, have had to make a sudden and drastic change in the way they teach.

The Open Justice Centre team has created the ‘Taking Clinical Legal Education Online’ workshop to share its approach to developing meaningful online pro bono activities for students. It will be open to anyone working in the legal education sector.

The team runs a Justice in Action module, which was designed to make experiential legal education accessible to part-time distance learning law undergraduates. It also creates useful resources for the public in relation to legal information, advice and guidance.

Drawing on its experience, the module team will outline some of its core innovations for sector colleagues, including its:

• Online legal advice clinic
• Smartphone apps project
• Use of virtual reality
• Development of online partnerships
• Remote group working practices
• Approach to assessing online clinical activity.

The workshops will be delivered by Hugh McFaul and Francine Ryan, Co-Directors of the Open Justice Centre.

Hugh said: “The Open University has 50 years of experience in distance learning – this is what we do best. The Open Justice Centre team has worked hard to apply distance learning practices to develop and deliver online pro bono activities for students which support their learning and expose them to useful, relevant experience. With so many face-to-face educators now having to switch their tactics to online, we wanted to support our industry colleagues by delivering a workshop to share our approach to online legal education.”

Anyone wishing to take part can register at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/taking-clinical-legal-education-online-tickets-103455524258?utm-medium=discovery&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&aff=escb&utm-source=cp&utm-term=listing

After registering, participants will receive joining instructions in advance of the event.