Establishing CELL
In 2018, CELL was established as an initiative of committed employees and students, and at the same time it was the Faculty's response to societal changes and changes in lawyers' role. CELL wanted to give legal education a direction that met the requirements of the present and the future.
The start-up of CELL can also be described as an extension of the faculty's investment in quality education. CELL has brought together committed teachers and students in a resource center for the development of new forms of teaching, experimentation with technology in learning and collaboration with working life and academia.
CELL does not have the power to make decisions, but give advice, take the initiative, make proposals for change, lead the way and contribute to a culture of sharing.
Outside expectations
The "Stortingsmelding 16 (2016-2017) - Culture for quality in higher education" includes clear expectations regarding a wider use of student-active forms of learning. The report also focus on the relevance to work life and digitalization. Also, the law sector has new expectations. In The Future of the Professions, Richard Susskind writes that the job market for lawyers is changing, and points out that lawyers in the future must have basic digital skills in order to handle the legislation and legal processes characterized by new technologies. There is also more focus on mediation and preventive measures, risk management, interdisciplinary collaboration and internationalization.
CELL is a direct response to these expectations. We know that among employers and students today there is a great demand for vocationally relevant skills, and we want to meet this demand. We are getting more and more laws and regulations - our society is becoming increasingly legalized. As a citizen, you will come into contact with the law more often. At the same time, digitization is making inroads, with an impact on law making, access to legal aid and what kind of legal issues we have to deal with. This has created a need for law students to develop practical legal skills such as oral presentation, negotiation and mediation, mediation and the ability to interact with non-lawyers.
Students must also have an understanding of the prospects and challenges digitization and new technology present in the administration of justice.
Experience-based learning
Experience-based learning, or student active teaching, is particularly suitable for developing legal skills and provides a deeper understanding of the law's role in society. Experience-based forms of teaching can be built into ordinary teaching without incurring the cost of learning theory. In short, experiential learning is learning by doing: the students gain experience through, for example, role-playing, work with cases, practice or real assignments for external partners. In a framework that gives room for reflection and experimentation, the students will be motivated to a greater extent to seek, understand and master new knowledge.
Experience-based teaching has the advantage that it contributes both to making studies more relevant to work life, and to students becoming more motivated to seek, understand and master new knowledge.
There is an underuse of experience-based teaching in law studies, despite the demand from work life for students with vocationally relevant skills. Only sporadic experiments have been carried out around such teaching methods in the USA and Europe. Despite this, law is a course where experience-based teaching will be particularly beneficial. There are three reasons for that:
- The lawyers work with many varied tasks
- The profession is changing, due to new technology and new approaches to conflict management and dispute resolution
- Legal studies are increasingly characterized by interdisciplinarity, internationalization, empiricism and computer-based methods.
Developing the training of skills will strengthen the work life relevance of a study program. In addition, experience-based learning provides deeper learning and a better understanding of roles. But it also has other advantages: with more investment in skills training, together with varied forms of assessment, we can reduce pressure on grades and a negative competitive culture. And, as a student, you get a wider range of skills that you can develop.
Criterias
Student-active forms of learning will not automatically lead to improved quality of education. They must be adapted to the subject area's character and the purpose of the subject of the study program. CELL has developed a model with the following criteria for qualifying new experience-based forms of learning:
- Activities must have a defined educational purpose.
- They must require active participation of the students, or provide an opening for real legal assignments or tasks.
- The activity must be evaluated and graded.
- Activities must be repeatable and must be documented.
What we do at CELL
The activities at CELL can be summarized as follows:
Introduce and develop: We will further develop existing teaching plans, and make it possible for more courses and programs at the faculty to adopt student-activating teaching methods
Experiment: The elective courses we develop should be a "sandbox" for testing, among other things, new technology and new forms of role-playing
Research on teaching: We will provide access to research on our teaching methods and invite researchers to the centre
Communicate and share: We must document what we do and share and disseminate new knowledge from projects we carry out
What CELL prepares in terms of proposals, activities and new teaching plans is presented to the decision-making bodies at the faculty.