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SHE: The Virtual Law Office

SHE: The Virtual Law Office

SIMITA - SIMulations in Transactional Activities

We are also developing an online Transactional Learning Environment (TLE) that fosters the team cohesion of students working in groups and their interactivity within their own team and with other teams. This TLE allows us to support educational simulations of a transactional nature efficiently. The system is built on a set of technologies that are already in place and well supported at the university: Blackboard Academic Suite (virtual learning environment), Microsoft SharePoint (content and communication management platform) and Wimba Collaboration Suite (collaborative multimedia tools). Thus SIMITA is not a new system, but a new conceptual deployment of existing learning technologies. This development model offers significant advantages in terms of resourcing, reliability and flexibility, and has enabled us to develop the SIMITA platform very quickly and grow it dynamically following a learning design model. The design approach is purposefully student-centered, aimed at facilitating the experience of engaging with a simulation-based type of learning activity (for example, by devolving ownership and management of the virtual environment to students as much as possible). We are piloting SIMITA to support the Legal Process Module of the School of Law at UWE. It is a final year undergraduate course that takes 24 students each year. A series of around 25 weekly three-hour workshops are largely devoted to skills acquisition through practice and reflection. After the first few weeks of the course students are asked to form ‘firms’ of 4 for the first simulation – a civil case. There are 3 simulations – claimant/defendant actions – running in parallel, using the same case scenario. The firms are asked to take the case as far as negotiation and reach a settlement. The groups are then dissolved and students form new groups for the second simulation – a criminal case, where 3 groups work for the Crown Prosecution Service and 3 for the defence. The criminal case ends in a mock Crown Court before a judge and jury.

SIMITA offers a location to store, generate, edit and update all the case documents and resources; also, quicker methods of communication between firms, firms and tutors, firms with their clients and other parties. Directories can be used to assemble all the personal information that is collected – this is particularly useful when new characters are created ad hoc. It also features a virtual town map that contextualises all the information that makes up the different cases that firms have to work on. Firms and individuals within them maintain activity logs and reflective logs online and can append other materials to their logs (e.g. assessment feedback). This ‘virtual law office’ also stores tutor and peer feedback on skills development. There are links to academic, legal and student-produced resources (e.g. student oral presentations, witness statements, etc.).

In short, SIMITA gives students the opportunity to acquire and practise caseworking skills with the help of technology that behaves and feels exactly like that of a modern professional office. From the tutors’ perspective, SIMITA offers the advantage of being able to monitor how groups are working much more easily than with paper-based transactions.

Initial pilots of SIMITA have shown it to be easy and attractive to use. Students engage with it readily, enjoying the opportunity to make the space their own (for example, by being able to personalise their own firm’s website and by being able to communicate with their partners using a social networking-type interface). They have also demonstrated a commitment and motivation to progressing the civil casework beyond what might have been expected, given that this input and time is not directly linked to assessment. System statistics collected for the first pilot (24/11/2008-20/02/2008) show that the system received just over 4,000 hits during that period. Considering the small size of the group (24 students divided into 6 firms) and the non-assessed nature of the activities they carried out, one can infer that our current approach has the ability to motivate and engage students. The second pilot using the platform started on 23rd February 2009 with an assessed criminal case. The combined statistics for both pilots show that the system has received over 10,000 hits since 24th November 2008 until the end of April 2009. The following graphs show the spread of students’ access to SIMITA by hours of the day over the first pilot period, and the spread of access by day of the week. The considerable level of evening and weekend activity further evidences the engagement of students.