1. Adaptive Teaching Approaches
Implications for the Law Curriculum

2. Current Environment 21st Century students Grown up with Technology
Most have part time jobs
Most will have major higher education debts
More law students then ever in law schools
41 Australian law schools

3. Post GFC Tightening up of Market Not as many lawyer positions
Need to look wider than the legal profession for employment
Law School responses – Western Sydney – Reduced our law student intake by 20%

4. Reframe legal education
What do our law students need?
Still need critical thinking
Ability to communicate, be it in the law office or other professional work
Exhibit a professional approach to their law studies
Ethical approach to learning

5. Reframe our learning and teaching
Academic staff numbers are not growing
Academics have not been trained or have little experience in technological devices
Resources are not necessarily available
Confusion over what is meant by online, flipped classroom, and the use of interactive devices

6. Online Material/Flipped classroom
Providing material online and nothing more?
Flipped classroom – utilises multimedia applications
Integration of e learning and then reinforcing this with face to face tution
Issues? Tied to assessment; Academic staff and adjustment of teaching style

7. Is this Enough?
Need to use active learning methods across the curriculum
Academics cannot force students to learn
Academics can only create good learning environments for students

8. Adaptive approaches Just in time teaching Concept mapping teaching?
Collaborative not Adversarial Emphasis?
What is this all about?

9. Stop thinking about Silos
Assumption is that everyone teaches roughly substantive law in fairly similar sequences
Introductory Law, Torts, Contracts, Criminal Law

10. First Year renewal at WSU
First Year Report 2015
Need to integrate active learning of the Course content throughout the law degree
Realignment of first year units studied

11. First year Framework
Fundamentals of Australian Law (FAL) and Criminal Law studied at the same time
More face to face tution for FAL
Legal Analysis and Critique (LAC) studied with Torts
More face to face tution for LAC

12. Collaboration between Teachers
Equity/Property
Trusts/Revenue Law
Contracts/Property/Revenue Law

13. Example: Revenue Law
Contract Law: Oral/Written Contract principles with Capital Gains Tax
Property Law: Notions of Property aligned with Capital gains
Trusts Law: Aligned with Wills, Death and Income and Capital gains
Corporate Law: Aligned with revenue Law from a perspective of separate legal entity

14. Concluding comments
More face to face tution for First year introductory units
Acquisition of skills linked with application of a substantive subject
Collaboration between academics over content
Scaffolding of content, online material, student expectations and assessments