Digital teaching-learning in law

Abstract

Distance learning, or DL, in higher education institutions in Portugal, has become a priority for the Portuguese government, focusing mainly on the extension of this type of education to the Portuguesespeaking world. This priority reflects the guidelines for the 2018-2030 technological and business innovation strategy, approved by the Council of Ministers, and included in the National Digital Skills Initiative 2030 that concretizes a strategy for the country's digital development. However, our current reality, as a result of COVID-19, imposes the use of these tools to all teaching, from basic to higher education, to minimize the impediment of face-to-face classes. Thus, DL is an alternative model to be implemented and tested, now, on a large scale. It is important to underline that DL should be viewed as a modality of education for the democratization of knowledge, where it will be available to anyone who wants to know about it, regardless of place, time and formal teaching structures. In addition to the use of complete and intelligent platforms, with instruments capable of assessing different skills and competences, distance learning is more individualized and focused on the student. Studying online gives more space for students to manage their own time, which favors productivity, concentration, and motivation. Instead of periodic tests and assignments focused on only one piece of content, DL facilitates continuous evaluations, which provide immediate feedback on performance. The spaces for discussion between student and teacher in the forums are tools for the active construction of knowledge, in search of the truth, and not for the answer to a question put on a test. This poses a new challenge, namely, the assessment of students, assuming the use of a whole new set of teaching methodologies. But it is also an unprecedented opportunity. In this paper, we focus on these and other challenging aspects in DL and propose some solutions to its implementation, in the area of Law, which is traditionally conservative and little receptive to the use of new technologies as essential work tools for the current world. We will have as our base the state of the art “distance learning” and the analysis of this mechanism in the current context and, in this case, in the teaching of Law.