Law schools dive into virtual reality experiences for their students
“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.
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One of the biggest challenges that these law schools have faced in implementing virtual reality technology into their teachings are the hardware limitations.
For instance, Ajmi pointed out how the difficulties of using 360-degree videos come about when they are rendered, which takes almost as much time as the video itself. “The 360 video is really difficult because there is a lot of data in the files,” Ajmi said. “The files that they generate are huge and take up a lot of space.”
Moreover, there is a limited availability of readily available technical expertise at these law schools. Most law students and professors are simply not versed in high-tech.
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