November 11, 2024
Simulation is a powerful way of learning in any profession. Health professions, for example, use simulation to help students learn knowledge and skills and to fuse both in practice. Examples range from learning on mannequins to practising with real people as simulated patients. Almost all professions, including business schools, architecture, flight schools and the military have their own models of simulation learning.
There are forms of simulation in legal education already – the moot court is probably the most common in law schools. But most of our lawyers conduct business in the form of client files, and client-centred work is not often the subject of legal education. Here at OsgoodePD we have been developing a form of simulation fairly new to Canadian professional education – a digital case management platform called SIMPLE – SIMulated Professional Learning Environment. SIMPLE comprises two elements: a case management system, and a simulation engine. The case management system enables learners to practise a form of learning we call transactional learning, where learners can be immersed in client cases that range from very straightforward client actions (such as writing a single letter to a client) to representing a client in an entire complex case with multiple fictional players, nested tasks, and spanning weeks or longer. The simulation engine makes the sim work under the hand of a facilitator. It also helps sim authors to create the simulation, upload resources, test the sim, run it, archive it and retrieve it for future use.
SIMPLE succeeds because it tracks authentic legal practice. It is close to the world of practice yet safe from the possibilities of malpractice and negligent representation. It enables learners to practise legal transactions, discuss the transactions with supervisors, tutors, other professionals or each other, obtain feedback or feedforward, and be assessed on their work. It can be used with other forms of simulation such as simulated clients. With these functions, it is a rich learning environment. It is also a highly flexible platform, allowing learners to work as individuals or in virtual firms, and for their work on transactions to be reviewed and advice given them, or for them to be assessed in a wide range of high-stakes assessments. SIMPLE does this because, uniquely in legal education, the learning zone isn’t separated out from the assessment zone: the two are fused, as they nearly always are in real legal practice.
The sim engine allows authors and designers wide latitude in creating a sim. As in real practice, a learner can work on multiple transactions simultaneously, and a sim designer can plan these across a span of time from a few days to a few months. Learners thus learn to pace a transaction, and the value of case review, preview, client communications and managing the arc of a transaction. If working in virtual firms, student lawyers learn the values of collaboration, and the need for swift trust in the group of lawyers. SIMPLE contains tools that facilitate such trust.
With its commitment to experiential forms of learning, OsgoodePD engaged a firm of US-based simulation developers, Forio to build SIMPLE. Professor Paul Maharg, the creator of the first instance of SIMPLE in the UK, led the project. SIMPLE will be used in a range of courses, including the capstone module of the Professional LLM in Canadian Common Law, and will in time be used in a variety of ways.
Paul Maharg – Osgoode Professional Development
Paul Maharg is a part-time Professor of Law at Manchester Law School, and works as a consultant to Osgoode Professional Development, Osgoode Hall Law School. He also holds a Visiting Professorship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law (third term of post).