E-Learning “Legal Method” Course For Law Students at Open University Sri Lanka

Abstract

Law is applicable in anywhere and everywhere in our life. Therefore learning law is very important also. Open University of Sri Lanka is the leading university providing law degree programme.Nowadays, rapid development of Information and Communication Technologies leads to introducing new forms of communication and elearning. ELearning covers the use of computers and technology as a guide for knowledge exchange within teaching and learning among any programme in the world but still not widely employed in Sri Lanka.The aim of the project was to provide enhanced educational support to the learners in addition to traditional teaching and learning by developing an online course for the Department of Legal Studies. Interviews, questionnaire and observations were used to analyze the attitudes about online course and organization’s current teaching and learning system. Also tried to understand the current system and made an effort to find system deficiencies, by finding user requirements for suggested online course on Legal Method. The analysis of the data shows positive attitude among the learners and teachers for implementing an online course. Each lesson consists with learning materials, activities, quizzes, assignments and forums. Moodle was used to create effective online course and MS PowserPoint and iSpring toolkit was used to create e learning study material.Evaluation of the online course as well as monitoring the learner was done throughout the lifecycle of the project and it was identified that the deficiencies in traditional face to face learning has been overcome with the help of the online course. Through user requirements, the project comes up with a reliable online course that will help the department administration manage courses and monitor learners’ progress. Therefore the collaboration between learner and staff would be improved with developed e-learning course.