This blog post is contributed by Professors Adrien Habermacher & Yves Goguen
In 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.
The Faculty of Law of the Université de Moncton is not offering any in-person activities this fall. All the courses planned, in the first year and in upper years, are taking place online. It was determined that advocacy courses, including the appellate advocacy course which is mandatory in the J.D. program, could not be delivered this year, either online or in person.
Faculty members have adopted a wide range of teaching strategies. These include, among others, the preparation and use of recorded capsules for asynchronous teaching, a greater emphasis on interactive exercises and discussions during class time (synchronous), or synchronous sessions throughout the timetable, intended to replicate in-person classes.
It is the policy of the Université de Moncton that the lecture portions of courses be recorded. Each instructor chooses to record parts of his or her class as long as he or she determines that his or her teaching is based on lectures in synchronous sessions.
The faculty was able to offer techno-pedagogical support during synchronous sessions to lecturers and faculty members who expressed a need. This support consisted of the hiring of a student; this person's task is to help the teacher and the students to solve the simplest technological problems, as well as to facilitate the pedagogical exchanges (for example by signalling to the teacher the questions posed in chat or “hands up”).