Simulation and learning in law & business – the use of SIMple & simulated clients

This webinar hosted by SCiLAB, focused on two significant educational approaches in Law and related disciplines, namely the use of a new simulation platform, SIMple, along with the use of simulated clients (SCs). 

SIMulated Professional Learning Environment (SIMple)

SIMple is a digital simulation platform for use by law schools and other client-based disciplines and professions. It has been developed and funded by Osgoode Professional Development and built by Forio, a niche simulation developer based in San Francisco. It comprises two parts: a sim engine for designing, authoring, testing, running, archiving and redeploying a sim; and a case management system that can be used by both students and academic staff, which replicates the key elements of a professional case management environment and can accommodate both real people and fictional characters. Based on earlier work in Scotland, it has undergone a successful beta test, and is being used in a variety of courses in LLB, JD and professional programmes.

Simulated Clients (SCs)

Readers may know that sim clients are lay people trained to do two things well: to represent a legal problem to a (student) lawyer as an authentic conversation in an interview, and to assess the client-facing skills of the lawyer in either formative or summative assessments. Deriving from the use of simulated patients in medical education, SCs have been trained and used in over 16 projects worldwide. Staff seminars have been held in London, Canberra, Toronto and Amsterdam.   

Neither of the two approaches are uniquely innovative: both have been trialled and used with students over a number of jurisdictions and programmes of study. But in this international event that spanned usecases from England and Canada we showed and discussed the fusion of the two approaches in professional learning.  

Michael Bean (Forio) and I began by presenting the methods: Michael demonstrated the concept and broad functionality of the SIMple platform. I outlined the history and purpose of the Simulated Client Initiative (SCI), together with the training and use of SCs in law and business. In the first usecase, Prof Shelley Kierstead explained how she will be using both in her 1L Introductions to Legal Skills course in Osgoode Hall Law School’s JD (the postgraduate qualification undertaken by those wishing to become lawyers in Canada). And Chris Sykes of Manchester Law School discussed the use of SIMple in a Masters course called Professionalism in Practice, and his planned fusion of the two.

Webinar presentation resources

Here’s the link to the complete recording of the presentations. 

Below are links to our webinar slidedecks:

• Paul Maharg – Webinar introduction
• Michael Bean – Intro slide [for demonstration of SIMple see above link to recording, at 4.18]
• Paul Maharg – Simulated clients: Situated theory and practices
• Shelley Kierstead – Exposure to law in practice: Introductory Lawyering Skills
• Chris Sykes – Trial run: Professionals in Practice.

In addition to the recording and slidedecks we made the following resources available to participants. Where there are no weblinks below, the full texts are uploaded on a private Zotero library – for access, email me at [email protected]. 

Comments

Why run this webinar? For two reasons: to reveal the ways that digital is used to suppress innovation, and the ways that digital can be used to release and support innovation. On the first point, digital quite profoundly affects attention: it distracts us, it focuses our attention on some things not others, it can occlude what might be objects of our attention almost entirely. We might think we have agency in such acts, deciding to attend to this rather than that object; but within any digital environment such assumptions are naïve at best, given the intentions of digital environment designers.

A good example of this is the fine work done by Lauren Leek on restaurant listings in Google Maps, uncovering the hidden values and intentions of the app. According to her the face-value story of Maps is that …

The same is true of educational methods. Like restaurant listings on Google Maps they are locationary, places where study activities take place: on the web, in university libraries, in lecture theatres, seminar rooms, bedsits, cafes, etc. 

But how such activities are represented digitally, how our attention is distributed, ranked, assigned, applied, affects what happens educationally. If our attention were a word cloud, which activities would dominate? Reading, essays, lectures, exams, tutorials? What about simulations? They would scarcely appear at all, font size 6. And yet they can be powerful heuristics in almost every discipline. 

Shulman’s concept of the hegemonic power of signature pedagogies becomes ever more entrenched in the digital context because signature pedagogies are given a digital and data ‘cumulative-advantage dynamic’ in Leek’s words within environments such as learning management systems and content management systems.(1)These systems increase the power of signature pedagogies precisely because the platforms are neither designed nor used to challenge them but exist to compound their power.

And yet digital does offer opportunities to contest the power of signature pedagogies. In the past I’ve written about how digital does two things simultaneously: it fragments, unbundles, disintermediates, and it converges and fuses.(2)These processes are only apparently contradictory: they actually feed into one another in quite complex, unanticipated ways. In doing so they enable us to assemble an infrastructure that can support new and emerging pedagogies. That infrastructure must include communities of practice where educators form groups within and across institutions to support each other in their innovative practices.

Which is why we need webinars such as this one to demonstrate and discuss the use of innovative platforms that host and shape new and innovative pedagogies – what Shulman called the shadow pedagogies, which in every discipline struggle to escape occlusion by signature pedagogies. And why we need groups of innovators to show what they’re doing with the new methods, and form communities of practice to support others in their turn – the main motive behind this webinar.

Please do browse around the resources. And if you want to know more about either, just drop me a line.

My thanks to my fellow presenters for their time in preparing and presenting on their work; and to Liz Hardie, Kate Bunker and Dawn Evelyn of SCiLAB for working with us on the event.