Our ‘In Conversation With…’ events continued earlier this week, with representatives from Coventry Law School answering faculty-based questions from students.

The representatives were:

• Dr Alan East - Associate Head - Student Experience
• Dr Rhonda Hammond-Sharlot – Curriculum Lead

The event was chaired by Emily Long from CUSU, who was joined by Kezzia Macaulay, the Senior Course Rep for PG Law. We picked out three of the key questions from the event below…

What are your thoughts whilst reflecting on Semester One?

I'm really grateful for us all to the reps who provide feedback; it is vital that I get as much feedback from students as possible on a regular basis. Within Semester One, you'll note that we've put on a series which demonstrates to students what we've done as a result of your feedback. We'll probably redo that; for anyone who doesn’t know, it's a number of short videos which set out some of the things that we've done because of feedback and how we have implemented.

In Semester One we also created the ‘work opportunities and employability’ page on AULA. The feedback was that students required some bespoke Law employability guidance in addition to the wonderful work that the talent team do. We were able to set that page up to provide quite a bit of detailed information on how to get into the profession, whether that be as a barrister, solicitor or legal executive and also to introduce a number of different opportunities.

There was also the need for further support to network and so I'm really pleased that we have been doing a fantastic job with the employability work by introducing speakers and guests on a regular basis.

There's also been general feedback in terms of how we do assessments, how we provide feedback and we're always looking to implement certain changes to help students to deal with that feedback.

To improve how we use AULA so that you can get the best out of it is the most important thing for me, in my role of dealing with feedback.

It is quite common for students to miss out information on AULA. Although it is a huge bank of resources, it can be very confusing to navigate. What can the school do to streamline the content?

I think that's a really important point to streamline. The way Aula works is it ‘replicates’ social media in some respects. It's something that I've only just got to grips with since I rejoined in September, because prior to that we had Moodle. It is good for putting information on there, but as team of staff, we need to work on streamlining the information that goes out.

A piece of work that I've got to do as soon as this semester is finished is to make sure that posts are limited and perhaps Course Directors are able to organize it. That's something that I want to get to grips with in terms of the individual module pages. We need to set some sort of generic policy for the team to standardize it, so that it's regular and systematic. It does need work doing and that's a big project for me over the summer.

Because AULA is our only way of communicating with students, this is where all the information is added to and it's a really good resource for you to dip into as and when you need to do your assessment, prepare for workshops and find out about the wonderful stuff the Law school is offering, in terms of guest speakers etc.

We've already had a meeting of staff, so it's not something I need to persuade the team as a manager to do. They've already recognized it and engaged in a meeting where we discussed how to streamline it. It's just the case now of writing a policy and training the staff on AULA. This leads me to the point; we need to also train students on how to use AULA as well and that's something I want to do, starting with the next intake.

We need to have some sessions where we're showing you, as students, the best ways to get the most out of AULA as well. New students in particular need to be sat down and walked through it. But before we do that, we need to have got to get it into a more streamlined state with more consistency. We're on board with you that Aula is a wonderful thing. But at the moment, it's got too many legs.

Do students have access to Law specific information on entering the legal profession and opportunities from within Law?

This is something that we're really building on now thankfully, with the ‘work opportunities and employability page’. I know that because I've written it and there is in depth information on the legal profession, becoming a solicitor, becoming a barrister, the differences between them, and then even some non-law opportunities as well. So, there is that bulk of information with the links on AULA which is a good starting point, I'm more than happy to talk to students and I have many students email me about entering the profession. I sit on the Law Society Council in London as well, so I have a lot of contacts. If there are any questions, I’m obviously happy to deal with them as well in terms of opportunities within law. This is something we're always improving and trying to build upon.

There have been opportunities, too. We've got the Crown Prosecution Service’s online work experience, that's now run for the second year. It starts next week and there has been an application process that's just finished - up to 40 students will take part in an online placement. It works well; I did it when I was at the CPS last year and they get you to actually have a go at real cases (or at least case studies based on real cases). There have been Coventry City Council opportunities, where I had a member of their team come in to talk to students about getting a training contract there.

We still have a number of ‘In Conversation With…’ events remaining. Find out more about your School’s event here. A full transcript and video will be made available shortly.