Vocational Legal Education in Asia - Innovation, Interaction and Information Technology

Vocational Legal Education in Asia - Innovation, Interaction and Information Technology
Associate Professor Wilson CHOW (wschow@hku.hk), Assistant Professor Michael NG (michaeln@hku.hk), Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Legal education in Asia, including but not limited to mainland China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, has been undergoing significant changes in the past decade. Experiential learning has played an increasingly important role in their legal education reforms. Largely based on the models of the US and the UK, experiential learning in various forms such as law clinic, simulation and internship are of various degrees of success (or failure) in the Asian law schools. Some of these law schools are recently taking advantage of information technology in order to enhance the interactivity and the degree of realism in their experiential learning environment.
The Department of Professional Legal Education of The University of Hong Kong (HKU) pilots a technology-assisted project in the spring semester of 2012-13 with an aim to adding realism to the vocational legal education in Hong Kong. The panel will report on this project that consists of two initiatives which are ground-breaking, and in this sense innovative, in Hong Kong, and indeed are first of their kinds in Asia. The first one involves the Simulated Professional Learning Environment (SimPLE) which is a simulation e-Learning platform for transactional learning which learners are put in a professional context, where there are aggregates of transactions, perhaps multiple solution paths, and where their work is, as it will be in the workplace, distributed between tools, colleagues, resources, anticipated and unanticipated problems and individual constructions of knowledge and experience. The other is known as the Standardized Clients (SCs) who are people lay to the law discipline but are trained to present standardized scenarios to students and then comment on and assess students’ communicative competence. This panel will explain how these two initiatives have been tried out at the HKU and what students’ responses are. It will also sketch out the plan forward.
This panel calls for representatives from, but not limited to, Asia to report and share insights on innovation or innovative use of methods in teaching and learning in law, with the use of information technology in various form and extent, which may help increase the interaction of students among themselves, with their teachers, and perhaps most important of all, with the reality. Educators who are interested are welcome to join the panel presentation by getting in touch with the above speakers.

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