During the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.
This autumn term, the Peter A. Allard School of Law (Allard Law) is offering an in-person option for 1L instruction (as long as public health regulations permit). Each of our four 1L sections has been divided into three sub-sections. These groups of approximately 16 students will have access to a law school classroom on a rotating basis, and in a manner consistent with public health regulations including social distancing, masks, and daily check-in safeguards.
On designated weeks in the Fall Term, students in a given rotation may choose to come into the law school Tuesday-Friday (on any or all of those days) and take any or all of their classes for that day in an assigned classroom. Students can have lunch in this classroom, or leave and come back for any afternoon classes. The rotation system allows for faculty to deliver in-person instruction to a weekly sub-section through a hybrid model, in which the other 2/3 of the students are online at the same time. Instructors will choose whether to teach in the hybrid model, or entirely online.
The majority of upper year courses and seminars are being offered remotely this autumn term (Term 1, 2020 Winter Session). The only exception is that a small number of our clinical or experiential programs will have a mandatory in‐person requirement (assuming that public health directives continue to permit this). We will be using a Vancouver-time-zone schedule, but will consider other options for students studying in parts of the world that make attendance on this schedule particularly challenging.