Law schools are ramping up efforts to provide more experiential learning opportunities through virtual reality experiences that will allow both students and practicing attorneys to practice their lawyering skills anytime, anywhere.
“I was walking past the courtroom one day and saw students just waiting to use it … I also have spoken to attorneys in big firms who don’t have places to practice,” said Jennifer Wondracek, director of legal educational technology at University of North Texas Dallas College of Law. “My thought was, well, why not create a virtual courtroom?”
Wondracek served as a panelist for the “Virtual Reality: Opportunities for Teaching and Using it in Law Practice” presentation at this year’s ABA Techshow along with Kenton Brice, director of technology innovation at the University of Oklahoma College of Law and Ayyoub Ajmi, digital communications and learning initiatives librarian at University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law. They spoke about the advances their respective institutions have made in bringing virtual reality to their students and colleagues.
According to Ajmi, trial advocacy classes at UMKC Law have been incorporating cameras that shoot videos with a 360-degree angle. He argued that these cameras are helping students self-assess their public speaking capacities better than ever.
“By introducing a camera with a 360-degree angle, I’m recording both the student as an attorney and the jury at the same time,” Ajmi said. “Later when they’re looking back, they can look at their own performance and communication and also see how the jury interacts with whatever they’ve been saying without having to rely on more than one camera device.”
Check out the ABA Journal for more info.
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