Pencils up, law students. Some classrooms with the University of Toronto’s law program are ditching keyboards so students have to handwrite their notes this September. In an email to students at Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law earlier this week, Associate Dean Richard Stacey said many of his colleagues have grown concerned over how students are taking notes in class as they believe it impedes one of their core teaching principles. With many students using laptops to take “copious and comprehensive notes,” Stacey says they cannot critically engage with course content. That sort of engagement nurtures the “rigorous thinking about the law” that Jackman Law graduates are known to have, he wrote. “Faculty members have expressed concern about the impact that increasing use of technology during lectures, including sophisticated AI tools and laptops used for near-verbatim notetaking, can have on this aspect of our academic mission,” Christopher Essert, dean of U of T’s law faculty, said in a statement to CP24 on Saturday. It’s not that faculty are concerned about students being distracted by technology, Stacey adds in his email, it’s that students aren’t able to think deeply about what they are being taught in class or participate in class discussions. “There is a wealth of educational research that supports the conclusion that type-writing notes in class limits higher-order analytical thinking,” he writes. In these laptop-free classrooms, Stacey states students can still use a tablet to write, so long as they are handwriting with a stylus and not using the keyboard function. While Stacey acknowledges taking notes by hand is slower, he notes that pacing helps students “process information critically in real time and make higher-order analytical choices about what to write down.” “In short, we are no longer confident that we can graduate the best students in Canada in a classroom environment where technology inhibits critical engagement,” Stacey writes. He notes that many teachers are choosing to have “laptop-free classrooms” this year as a result; though, Stacey says laptops are not banned across the board. “Not all classes will be laptop-free, since faculty and adjuncts have different teaching styles and use technology in different ways in the classroom,” he writes. “The framework we have adopted is intended to support students in classes where instructors have chosen to go laptop-free, to set expectations and provide consistency.” Each laptop-free classroom will either provide AI-generated notes, a roster of rotating student typing note-takers, or class slides, speaker notes, or a similar record of the material covered in class. Stacey says by having participating classrooms provide notes, this can “take some pressure off” students and allow them to engage, participate and think during class, so they can take notes on points they deem themselves as critical. Students who are registered with accessibility services and are concerned about the impact of laptop-free classrooms are encouraged to consult their accessibility advisor to go over appropriate accommodations. Essert, meanwhile, did not say how many laptop-free classrooms there are or will be, just that some faculty are already restricting its use while many more are “actively” considering it. Students express concerns The Students’ Law Society (SLS) at University of Toronto surveyed the student body on their thoughts about the upcoming laptop changes, with more than a third (240 people) participating in the survey. Of those responses, about 76 per cent said they disagreed that the policy will benefit their education. Another 77 per cent of those surveyed feel the measures for laptop-free classes will be ineffective, while roughly 54 per cent think it will be very ineffective. “Students questioned whether AI-generated notes are reliable enough to depend on, and pointed out that a slide deck is usually a bulleted summary of something a professor spends an hour on in person,” Ishaan McLachlan, SLS’s president, said in a statement. Many students are concerned that this policy is being decided on their behalf, rather than encouraged, McLachlan added. Upper-year students now have to rebuild how they take notes during class and how they study, the president said, breaking trusted methods they have used for the last one or two years of exams. The student body is also concerned that laptop-free classrooms will single-out those who have accommodations. “If the only laptops in a classroom belong to students with accommodations, the accommodation becomes obvious to the room and that isn’t something an accessibility advisor can resolve,” McLachlan said. The president said the Students’ Law Society is meeting with the faculty on Monday.
