An impression that the debate in delivering online legal education is fast gathering pace is a genuine one. Alex Aldridge reported in the Guardian last week that Peter Crisp, Chief Executive of BPP, had opined at a major conference about the merits of “online only solicitor training”: “More flexible learning options allowing students to “work while they study”, according to BPP Law School chief executive Peter Crisp, who was critical of the legal regulators’ refusal to allow his organisation to deliver online only solicitor training.”
On 17 July 2012, it was reported that Edinburgh University had become the first UK university to sign up to a major influential US online delivery project of education. The investment in this project has been substantial; for example, elsewhere it is reported that: “Adding to Coursera’s success are UPenn and Caltech combined investment of $3.7 million in the company. With additional investment from current investors New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the company now totals over $22 million in funding.”
Educators tend to wish to go off the record about their views, which makes debating this much harder. One lecturer at BPP that I know remarked, “Truth told, I’m still mired in old-world teaching and techniques. The classroom sessions I deliver are very traditional”. Yet, another lecturer at BPP whom I know well too commented, “Be careful what you try to destroy. Education is very personal. One size doesn’t fit all.” In response to this, Jon Harman, Director of Learning Design and Media at the College of Law responded, “one size doesn’t fit all yet we keep insisting on it in formal education.”
The Legal Practice Course (LPC) as currently set, across most institutions and centres, is delivered as a ‘standard product’. This means that it has a highly rigorous specification, and the learning objectives and assessment criteria for each part of it are clearly specified. I appreciate how this is organised, from having had an OFQUAL/QCF course approved myself in fact. These can be aligned transparently with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) document for key objectives for the LPC which is available on their website. However, when it comes to the issue of face-to-face teaching and learning, the SRA is in fact very precise. According to clause 3.50 of the ‘LPC Information Pack’ (available here), “A face-to-face requirement has been set to ensure there are opportunities for all students to interact with each other and with tutors and to develop together their professional skills, attitudes and behaviours.”
As a student, I fully agree with this. Being a bit banal about it, BPP is ‘preparing you to practice’, not ‘preparing you to sit at one of a computer terminal to meet assessment objectives’. Teamwork and communication are highly sought-after competences in corporate law firms, and your ability to communicate articulately with colleagues and explain your ideas must be a key attribute of trainees. However, I remember once asking a partner at Freshfields how much international corporate law is done online, and he explained, characteristically openly, “an awful lot”. So the component of international corporate law which is being done online is growing itself, one suspects.
I learnt a lot about innovation management in my MBA, and this is a specific sector within business which decades of experience in other sectors of business might not match. I graduate in November, having completed this course successfully at BPP Business School earlier this year. With an ‘innovation hat on’, having done a full course with my tutor Dr Vidal Kumar (@VidalAndreas) which I loved, we were taught about the importance of culturing a wider network through key participants of a network, such as the Coursera network involving Stanford, Michigan, Lausanne and Princeton above; about having some ‘key adopters’ such as A-star universities, the operational issues which might limit or facilitate its success (e.g. fast technological infrastructure, clusters of innovation), but most importantly how you could secure competitive advantage through your business model through innovation. Crucially – and most fundamentally – you need to understand what an innovation is. An innovation is more than an invention – it has to be a dialogue between the person who created it, and its purpose, and its intended recipient. That is why it’s going to be interesting to see whether Menshn ‘takes off’. Innovation is not necessarily about improving on design specifications, in the spirit of the famous Henry Ford saying, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse'”. Likewise, producing an e-book is not the same as digitising a ‘conventional’ book.
This aspect is the heart of the issue. Democratising education is incredible, in that your outreach of the audience is of a different scale, but it means that you can offer online courses to the world. Many do not pass such courses because of the high attrition rate. Providers need to be able to ensure that such courses are not offered just because they are cheap, and indeed that the concepts of ‘cheap’ and ‘low price’ are not conflated with ‘cheap and nasty’. I believe online education can work, if supported by other means (such as the fact that students are individually supported by a real-life teacher so that there is regular monitoring of the learning experience which may not necessarily be the same as the assessment objectives). I first went up to Cambridge in 1993, so this is now my 18th year in higher education of some sort (some of which has not been on full-time or part-time courses), so I have much experience as an ‘end user’.
But the question must become also: what’s in it for the law school? By offering so many courses so cheaply, it is hard to see where the profit comes from, unless the inward investment comes from private equity or venture capital; but even then the private equity and venture capital firms need to consider carefully how sustainable the investment is, and in simple terms what the return-on-investment is? For example, the social media have been notorious in monetising their innovations; even possibly the chief strategy of making a profit from innovation, the initial public offering, has turned sour for Facebook.
This is a very complicated debate, but one which I will be sure to follow even though I will be leaving legal education for good in two months time, having done my LLM, LPC and MBA.
