Understanding the Experiences of Legal Education Facilitators and Learners During a Pandemic: Are We All in This Together?

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about the most seismic changes to the delivery of education in modern times, including in Universities. It is on the premise of this disruption to higher Legal Education that the authors set out to empirically investigate the experiences of both facilitators (law teaching staff) and learners (law students).

In light of the inability of Universities to offer a traditional classroom teaching environment, legal scholars had to adapt both their materials, and delivery and assessment methods swiftly to meet learners’ needs during the pandemic. Further, both those who teach, as well as those who learn, have had to overcome new personal complexities and pastoral wellbeing challenges as we all adjusted to new homeworking environments and hybrid learning delivery methods.

The purpose of this paper is to start to map the experiences of both lecturers and students. In doing so the research identifies trends and shared experiences amongst respondents.

This presentation starts to develops a new body of knowledge around efficient teaching and learning practices that legal education facilitators can deploy in future situations of disrupted (non-traditional) delivery.

Whilst such presents the result of our pilot study, going forward this research will map experiences across Wales in 2020/2021. In doing so such will help other facilitators reflect upon future learning practices when administering learning outside of traditional teaching practices. This is in order to better respond to the shared needs of our Law School communities, whilst further promoting excellence in legal education during times of crises.