A Noteworthy Regulatory Response
The COVID-19 crisis disrupted all levels in the education sector including legal education. Many schools, especially those that adopted a new school calendar, were not able to finish the second semester of School Year 2019-2020. While government regulators issued new regulations trying to adjust to the crisis, the Legal Education Board (LEB) must be commended for issuing a crisis-sensitive regulation that aims to support the law schools, the faculty, and the students who are all placed in a difficult situation due to this pandemic. As School Year 2020-2021 opens, law schools are given the flexibility to tailor-fit their policies to the local situation.
Responding to the disruption, the Legal Education Board conducted a quick study of the legal education situation in the Philippines. Currently, the entire legal education system has suspended all physical classes. Twenty-five law schools have migrated to online platforms for remote learning, but almost all of these institutions have suspended all classes including online ones.
Faculty members in law schools across the country revealed in the survey that law schools provided faculty members the discretion on how to proceed (40%). Using this discretion, the majority of the faculty respondents (63%) used self-paced learning as an alternative strategy. The second most common alternative learning mechanism was open-time assignments (44%). For the rest of the HEIs, the faculty members were directed to migrate to online learning platforms, while 14% were instructed to suspend all classes including online ones.
On the issue of experience among the faculty on the use of online learning platforms, faculty respondents were somewhat not prepared for online-based instruction and find it a somewhat difficult experience. The majority of the law faculty believe both student preparedness and engagement in the emergency online classes were lower than that in the traditional class setup. The ease of certain schools with emergency online shift is not shared by the majority of the legal education system. This implies that there is a remarkable need for present legal education theory to develop more modern and adaptable pedagogy and methods.
As is present in the bigger education system, there are existing inequalities in legal education that are threatened to be worsened by the pandemic. These inequalities exist between schools in terms of resources and know-how, but also between students in the same schools. Primarily, the technological divide shows significant segments of the student population do not have stable internet access. There is also a similar divide, perhaps to a lesser degree, among the faculty.
Technology-heavy learning methodologies may work to expand this gap.
Faced with these realities, the Legal Education Board has relaxed many of its policies to encourage innovation and provide flexibility to schools to manage their unique situation. The regulatory intervention during this pandemic is now focused on bridging the gaps in inequalities in education poised to be exacerbated by the pandemic, concerning technological, economic, gender, and cultural variances. (Based on the Policy Paper of the Legal Education Board entitled “Responding to a Pandemic: Refocusing on Welfare, Quality of Learning and Reducing Inequalities in Legal Education authored by Atty. Aaron Misa Dimaano)