The University of Law

There is no value for money for the £13.6k I spent to do the LPC online with Ulaw. I choose Ulaw because my employer suggested it as being a reputable provider, but I guess their view was based on their 80's perception of when they attended Christleton. There is no doubt that Ulaw is now a purely a for-profit organisation with very little interest in ensuring its students succeed.

The online course is so badly run you have to laugh or you would cry. Ulaw is happy to take £13,600 to let you take the LPC Online, but in reality all they do is upload 3 year old pre-recorded lectures and seminar materials and not provide much in the way of feedback or advice on how to tackle these materials. The year started okay, with units containing interactive activities and feedback from academic staff to test your learning, but some lectures were just recordings of a lecture room where you could barely make out the writing on the slides. By the end of November it was hit and miss if there was any interactive materials or feedback on each module. You learn more by speaking to your cohort than by actual feedback from the academic staff.

The Ulaw blackboard is complex in how to locate certain materials to aid you in learning remotely, and no guide is provided at the start of the course on how to use it. You learn by trial and error.

On top of this, there has been a cacophony of "technical issues" throughout the year. A few examples of these issues:
a) Being given an assessment on material that we had not yet been taught - turned out they were using material from a prior year;
b) Not being to able to access exams due to the amount of users overloading the system;
c) December and January exams crashing half-way through and being told that you have to resit. This happened again during the CPA exams;
d) Changing the exam proctoring programme a couple of weeks before CPA exams which resulted in a change in how the exam and "open book" materials were to be accessed, meaning resources weren't as easily accessible as in prior years;
e) The proctoring programme Ulaw changed to for the CPAs ran in to several technical issues which resulted in the exam not loading or crashing half way through (but don't worry, they were kind enough to give you another first attempt if you were affected by these issues). The new-system was that bad Ulaw scrapped it for the elective exams;
f) The Ulaw website went down for at least 24-hours during the peak of elective exams, meaning that unless you had a copy of materials already saved, you were unable to access them to supplement your revision. This occurred over the weekend with my next exam being at 9:30 on the Monday morning - there was a temporary resolution put in place midday on Sunday.

These issues would be barely acceptable if the online programme offered by Ulaw was new, but it has been established for over a decade, but it underpins that Ulaw is only focused on accumulating profits for an overpriced course that they know people will pay to reach their dream of becoming a solicitor. If I had the chance to resit the LPC, I would opt for another institution and to do it in person. Many other institutions now offer the same course at a fraction of the cost and I'd wager you'd get more support there too.

Terrible. Being an online student I was advised that I would not be able to take advantage of the learning facilities offered to in-person students. I could visit the online campus library (which was 30 miles away), but could only stay there for 2 hours at most. The local Ulaw campus to me had a relationship with another local academic institution to use their facilities, but because I was not enrolled at that specific Ulaw campus, I was not allowed to use them.

Online

You receive emails ever now and again about opportunities.

Very little support offered. Emails to academic tutors often go unanswered. There are the odd emails about mental wellbeing importance, but I feel that Ulaw only send these out to tick a check box.