Axing lectures, and April fools...

At first, I was highly tempted to reproduce this as a timely, seasonal shaggy-dog story - Law Students Demonstrate For More Lectures !  Given that SolicitR is self-defined as 'supriously legal' I did have my doubts - Julie Henry (education correspondent) also ran with this on the same date in the Telegraph - the Mirror was a full day early, but I was less cynical when the Manchester Evening News ran a u-turn story a few days later!

"With all the demonstrations going on in the run up to the G20, this one might just have slipped a little under the radar. Manchester law students recently marched on the office of Professor Alan Gilbert, president of Manchester University, to protest about cuts to their law degree course after being told that their lectures will be reduced from 30 hours a term to just 20 hours from next year."

Google News was excedingly unhelpful in my quest to seek whether "I'd been 'ad" or not.
Eitherway, given that cut-backs and other factors may be drivers for reduced contact time, can e-learning and blended learning assist?  Many argue that e-learning is time intensive to set-up (and I agree), and depepnding on how it is delivered, it may even be intensive to manage at various or all parts of the teaching period.  But, I have made cuts to contact time and now that my e-learning projects are reasonably established, I'm not spending all of the 'time saved' on the PC.  Students, on the otherhand, have mixed responses although in general they fare well.  Instead of using the term 'digital natives' I think that 'digitally naive' might be more apt as they are not incapable but perhaps less able to just pick-up and run with new technologies as one might expect with the class-bsaed lecture/seminar model.
Perhaps this is more of an issue for the law curriculum...
Google News was more helpful in finding reports of Second Life and other such things in higher education, with neighbouring MMU film and media students enjoying all bar two lectures for a particular module being delivered online.  This appears to be both substantive issues and practical skills (opening a business and advertising), yet perhaps the stakes aren't so high compared to a professsional degree where marks count for access to level two training and accreditiation.  But, I don't want to use that as an argument for not using alternative learning methods, it's merely reason to ensure that the student is able to engage and that supports are in place.  That isn't easy either!
I should also point out that Manchester's response is that any lectures cut would be replaced by tutorials and other teacher-led activities.

"In the case of law, we'd want more face-to-face time with tutors or in a training court room, rather than the `talking head' environment of a lecture."

Perhaps this will be more effective (although more reliant on physical spaces) than a Second Life courtroom...