ALT Annual Conference Speaker Abstracts

Parallel Session 2 - Session A

Large Language Models for Law School Teaching and Learning Lloyd Gash, Senior Lecturer, Chloe Sheppick, Lecturer & Deputy Director of the Professional Law Institute, and Mike Butler, Senior Lecturer & Director of the Professional Law Institute, Professional Law Institute, King’s College London

In this paper we discuss the learnings from initiatives at King’s College London to develop legal pedagogical LLMs.

The paper initially examines some of the theoretical literature about the use of LLMs in tutoring, formative assessment, and revision, and draws a clear distinction between the use of LLMs to supplement learning versus their use in summative assessment. It considers the impact of known issues with LLMs such as hallucinations, bias, and inexplicability on LLM use in legal pedagogy, and focuses on how design thinking can mitigate many of these limitations. This paper demonstrates the value of structured prompt engineering for legal teaching and learning. It describes a series of prompts and LLMs to meet legal pedagogical needs, and it outlines some methods to determine how we can assess the validity of the use of LLMs in law school teaching and learning. The paper shares initiatives taken to incorporate Generative AI on two modules within KCL’s MSc Law & Professional Practice course between January and May 2024.

The paper concludes that, used responsibly, LLMs promise to usher in a new era of personalised legal education that will benefit students and their teachers even as resources become tighter in legal education.

The Use of GAI-powered Assessment to Develop Critical Thinking and Problem-solving Skills Dr Naila Anwar, University of Huddersfield In September 2023, the Department of Education (DfE) published the Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in Education Policy paper suggesting that the education sector should utilise opportunities that AI provides. The DfE viewed that if used safely, GAI technology can support delivering an excellent education that prepares students to contribute to society and the future workplace. Following this guidance, and previously published reports from QAA, Jisc, and a statement from the 24 Vice-Chancellors of the Russell Group on the use of AI in Higher Education, many universities produced guidance/principles for AI use. These guidance and principles recommend training of staff supporting them to embed AI into their pedagogy of teaching and learning. They also encourage the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to support students to become AI literate alongside digital literacy. This paper is a case study of supporting students in developing their AI literacy as well as using AI appropriately and ethically in their studies. As part of the study, the students were asked to use AI at an early stage of their assessment preparation to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. This study found that an AI-enabled assessment helped to develop independent research skills and the ability of students to explain complex legal issues/terms.

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