Laxmi Devi is a passionate young lecturer who aspires to change the face of legal education. She joined the Faculty of Law in Multimedia University in July 2021. She graduated with a First-Class Honours from the University of Liverpool where she continued her LLM and was awarded a Merit in the LLM-Law, Medicine and Healthcare programme. She has always been dedicated to the craft of teaching and has been tutoring law since her undergraduate days while also giving mini lectures to potential students at the University of Liverpool during her Masters. She has also worked as a research assistant for a medical law paper in the UK and some papers in Malaysia. She currently lectures Equity and Trusts, and Consumer Law at Multimedia University. Her area of interests include Medical Law, Equity and Trusts, and Legal Education.
Reimagining the Future of Legal Education in the Metaverse in Malaysian Law Schools
Abstract:
Recently, there has been various paradigm shifts in the higher education sector. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a constellation of technologies to the legal education sector. University law academics are required to move beyond their primordial instinct to teach face-to-face, rather they are required to be more innovative by integrating technology to make the teaching and learning process more meaningful and engaging in the virtual platform. Consequently, the pandemic has enabled law academics to muster the courage to explore ingenious teaching pedagogies in order to replicate the conventional lecture hall interactions. There have been various creative pedagogies implemented in delivering legal education in Malaysian Universities such as the adoption of Gamification, Augmented Reality, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Virtual Legal Practice Experience, Virtual Internship, etc. However, are law schools in Malaysia ready to change their trajectory to deliver legal education in the Metaverse post-pandemic era? It is predicted that law schools can leverage the collaborative capabilities of virtual worlds – from enabling virtual collaborations, organizing virtual digital field trips to interacting with virtual environment to conduct case-studies. This research will also explore the possible challenges of the integration of Metaverse in the legal education. It will contribute to the existing body of literature as it broadens the understanding of the available opportunities and upcoming challenges of the changing cultures in the legal education Metaverse. This will be valuable to law academics, law students, educational institutions and educational technology providers.