Never mind the platform, heres the pedagogy: e-learning in environmental law

Abstract

Whether adopted out of choice or necessity, e-learning will undoubtedly be a feature of the future law school landscape. This requires law teachers – including environmental law teachers – to think quite deliberately about what it means to teach online. In this chapter, we explore e-learning as a specific approach to teaching and learning that may prove useful for environmental law – but the modality, we argue, is secondary to good instructional design. As alluded to in our chapter title, our discussion focuses less on e-learning as a platform, and more on its ‘pedagogical soundness’. In our own teaching of environmental and natural resources law, we have both enjoyed positive experiences with e-learning, and we have found, like others, that ‘no sacrifice in educational quality necessarily accompanies online legal education’. Our aim in this chapter however is not to suggest that e-learning is preferable to face-to-face instruction. We hope to demonstrate that, with careful planning and selection based on learning theory and desired learning outcomes, online learning can be used to deliver a pedagogically-robust environmental law course. We begin this chapter by briefly canvassing the tools and benefits of e-learning, before focusing in detail on its pedagogical value. We then discuss some of the challenges and constraints experienced with e-learning, and offer some commentary as to how these might be traversed. Ultimately, we contend that by viewing e-learning as a distinct pedagogy, rather than just a set of technological tools to replicate face-to-face teaching practice, environmental law lecturers can draw upon an effective educational approach grounded in social collaboration, active learning and authentic assessment.