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Teaching

You will be taught through face-to-face interactive workshops. Interactive workshops take a variety of forms and are intended to enable the application of learning through discussion and small group activities. They also allow the flexibility to enable discussion and development of understanding of topics, as well as practical exercises such as court applications. All of these are designed to develop subject-specific skills and how they would be applied in a professional context.

You have an opportunity to engage fully with the employability programme in the School of Law including volunteering in the School’s Legal Advice Centre. You will also have the option to attend the School of Law’s research seminar series and will be encouraged towards the end of the academic year to present a research seminar based on your dissertation research.

At the beginning of your studies, you will be assigned a personal academic tutor, and meetings with your personal academic tutor are scheduled on at least four occasions during your course.

The University places emphasis on enabling you to develop the independent learning capabilities that will equip you for lifelong learning and future employment, as well as academic achievement. In addition to the personal academic tutoring system, a mixture of independent study, teaching and academic support from Student Services and Library Services enables you to reflect on progress and build up a profile of skills, achievements and experiences that will help you to flourish and be successful in your career beyond university.

Location of teaching

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Contact time

The total amount of study time on this course is calculated with reference to the module credit, meaning that 180 credits equate to 1800 hours of study time in total.  By the very nature of this course, much of this time is taken up with independent self-study.

Typically for each taught module, the contact time will be:

• 15 credit modules - 12 weekly three-hour workshops.

The research modules contain the following contact time:

• The Legal Research Methods module includes 4 three-hour interactive workshops at the start of the module and 6 hours of scheduled supervisory sessions.
• The Dissertation module includes 4 three-hour workshops at the start of the module and 6 hours of scheduled supervisory sessions. These will be delivered face to face.  

Independent self study

In addition to the contact time (324 hours), you  will undertake 1,470 hours of personal self-study over the year.

Full time students will typically have 12 contact hours per week and will be expected to undertake 25 independent study hours per week. This makes a total of 37 hours per week.  

Part-time students will typically have 6 contact hours per week and will be expected to undertake 12.5 independent study hours per week. This makes a total of 18.5 hours per week.

The figures for contact hours cited above are for typical weeks in semesters 1 and 2. However, some weeks will involve a larger or smaller number of contact hours, e.g., due to Research Methods workshops in semester 1 or during the summer, in which there is more focus on independent study.

Independent learning is supported by a range of excellent learning facilities, including The Hive and library resources, the virtual learning environment, and extensive access to electronic learning resources, including legal databases such as Westlaw and Lexis.   

Duration

• 12 months full-time
• 24 months part-time

Timetables

Timetables are normally available one month before registration. Please note that whilst we try to be as student friendly as possible, scheduled teaching can take place on any day of the week, and some classes can be scheduled in the evenings.

Teaching staff

You will be taught by a teaching team whose expertise and knowledge are closely matched to the content of the modules on the course. The team includes senior academics and legal practitioners with professional experience.

Teaching is informed by research and consultancy, and all course lecturers have a higher education teaching qualification or are Fellows of the Higher Education Academy.

Assessment

The course provides you with opportunities to test your understanding and to learn informally through the completion of practice or ‘formative’ assignments, which incorporate activities such as practice questions, reviews of brief plans, group work, mini presentations, mini drafting exercises and quizzes. The exact formative assessment used varies by module. 

Each module has one or more formal or ‘summative’ assessments which are graded and count towards the overall module grade. Assessment methods include a range of coursework assessments such as essays, reports, portfolios, drafting tasks, individual and group presentations, a dissertation, client interviewing, legal advice and multiple-choice tests. 

Programme specification

For comprehensive details on the aims and intended learning outcomes of the course, and the means by which these are achieved through learning, teaching and assessment, please