Disintermediator or another intermediary? E-simulation platform for professional legal education at University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Education has been undergoing significant changes in the past decade. Some universities have been taking advantage of information technology in order to enhance the interactivity and the degree of realism in their experiential learning environment. More recent legal education and training reviews and current scholarship, including the latest discourse on disintermediation of legal education, readily assume the tech-enablement of students’ learning experience via the use of technology. This article argues, through a reflective and empirical study of the adoption and adaptation of an e-learning platform by the Department of Professional Legal Education of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in its Postgraduate Certificate in Laws programme (“HKUPCLL”), that the use of technology can possibly turn out to be another unwelcomed intermediary in the disintermediation process if it is not adaptive to the students’ needs and expectations which may be shaped by their evolving e-behaviour, different background and cultural particularities. It further proposes to modify the disintermediation discourse by embracing this possibility of inhibition, so that it can become a suitable model to assess the effectiveness of use of technology in legal education.
Keywords: E-simulation; Professional legal education; disintermediator or intermediary; Hong Kong experience
Published
Issue
Section
License
EJLT is an open access journal, aiming to disseminate academic work and perspectives as widely as possible to the benefit of the author and the author’s readers. It is the assumption of the EJLT that authors who publish in the journal wish their work to be available as freely and as widely as possible through the open access publishing channel.
Authors who publish with EJLT will retain copyright and moral rights in the underlying work but will grant all users the rights to copy, store and print for non-commercial use copies of their work. Commercial mirroring may also be carried out with the consent of the journal. The work must remain as published – without redaction or editing – and must clearly state the identity of the author and the originating EJLT url of the article. Any commercial use of the author’s work - apart from mirroring - requires the permission of the author and any aspects of the article which are the property of EJLT (e.g. typographical format) requires permission from EJLT.
Authors can sometimes become no longer contactable (through, for example, death or retirement). If this occurs, any rights in the work will pass to the European Journal of Law and Technology which will continue to make the work available in as wide a manner as possible to achieve the aims of open access and ensuring that an author's work continues to be available. An author - or their estate - can recover these rights from EJLT by providing contact information.
The European Journal of Law and Technology holds rights in format, publication and dissemination.
EJLT, as a non-commercial organisation - which receives donations to allow it to continue publishing – must retain information on reader access to journal articles. This means that we will not give permission to mirror the journal unless we can be provided with full details as to reader access to each and every journal article. We prefer and encourage deep linking rather than mirroring. Encouragement is thus given for all users – commercial and non-commercial – to provide indexes and links to articles in the EJLT where the index or link points to the location of the article on the EJLT server, rather than to stored copies on other servers.
Please contact the European Journal of Law and Technology if you are in any doubt as to what this statement of use covers.