Zoom Law School, It Was Good
Last summer, 2020, the number of COVID-19 cases in Saskatchewan was low. There was a glimpse of hope that we might have some activities in person at the College of Law. All hopes turned into dust when the surge in case numbers forced us back into our self-isolation environment again. September arrived, and we were all sitting behind our computers watching the orientation to our law journey begin on YouTube, and the rest is history.
Zoom University might not have been what I would like to experience for my first year of law school. To spend all my time behind a screen and not having a chance to participate in all the glamourous and fun activities of Law School was a dreadful thought. However, online teaching and learning changed my mind soon. Saddened with remote work, I immediately realized the benefits and powers of the digital world for a law student.
Access to knowledge made easy
In these days and age, the first place we turn to find an answer to our questions is simply to search it on Google or look it up on Wikipedia. A similar thing could be the case in law school as well. Our professors prepared practical online courses where reading materials, lecture notes, and videos were accessible online with the transition to the online world. In a pre-pandemic world, such a measure would be rare or non-existent in some classes. Also, if a student missed a lecture class or writing some notes, the information would be gone for good probably. With the inevitable need for remote teaching/learning, the college and professors paid extra attention to ensuring quality education was available to us through our Canvas system.
In addition to online teaching resources, the Law library’s measures were a great help to foster our educational journey. In addition to traditional legal sources like CanLII, our library provided access to other legal databases such as Irwin E-book, where we could find our textbooks and casebooks for free. Cost-effectiveness aside, more databases and digital access to information meant more success rate in our studies. Everything we wanted and needed was only one click of a mouse away. Such services are something that we would not enjoy the luxury of in a non-pandemic world.
Career search became borderless
Early on in Term 1, we learned that career search starts as early as our first year, at least in Saskatchewan’s legal community. In normal times, face-to-face networking would be an integral part of job search, but with our faces hiding behind masks, we needed a novel way to do the job of finding a job.
Almost all career development activities moved online. The best thing out of this was the ability to attend career fairs and law firms’ showcases across the country via the Internet. This reduced the need for travelling to attend those events and saved us a lot of money. We could also participate in many different events in different places in a day. Scheduling, preparing for, and attending those events seemed easy now that I could only use my Outlook Mail and Zoom services.
Networking and finding mentorship opportunities online were more manageable than what I heard from my upper-year peers in their pre-pandemic years. I would simply find the lawyers I wanted to learn from online, send them an email, and schedule a Zoom coffee and conversation. This would take only a few days to arrange with minimal time commitment for both ends.
The road ahead
With vaccination numbers rising every day and daily cases falling (hopefully!), there is a great chance that we are going to have some in-person activities in our law schools across the country. Online teaching and career services have taught us a great deal in using technology to organize our affairs effectively. The digitization of law school life has shown great efficacies such as cost and time savings.
The online resources will stay with us, and I think we should continue using them alongside in-person post-pandemic life. For example, our university has upgraded the servers, installed new online learning tools, investing in software licenses, and many more. The professors have already prepared a year’s worth of online content that they can use and upload again for future classes. Online networking and career fair sessions for out-of-province events could carry on via the Internet again. All of these measures could lift some pressure off of our shoulders when life starts to go back to normal!
