Graduate Diploma in Legislative Drafting - Open access courses and webinars

Two decades of development of distance education for legislative counsel has culminated in the offering of open access online courses by Athabasca University. The first distance training program was authored by Professor Keith Patchett for the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Commonwealth of Learning in 1995. At that time students were provided with computer discs and paper materials. Later, the course was offered online and became the foundation of Athabasca University's diploma program in 2008.

Now anyone may study four online non-credit courses in legislative drafting free of charge. These take the form of open courseware (OCW) which contains all of the study materials in Athabasca's diploma program including interactive online drafting exercises. Guests to our open access courses may print the study materials by logging in as a guest. If you wish to work on the exercises or to contribute to the online forum, please begin at the following page: http://ocw.lms.athabascau.ca/course/view.php?id=62.

Then log in using these details:

Username: legal_studies
Password: password123

The subjects are:

• Legislative Drafting Program - Detailed Hyperlinked Table of Contents
• LGST 551 - Introduction to Legislative Drafting
• LGST 553 - Legislative Structure, Style, and Limits
• LGST 555 - Drafting Preliminary, Amending, and Final Provisions
• LGST 557 - Implementation Provisions and Drafting Processes

They are available at this link.

Thanks are due to the Commonwealth of Learning which made the study materials available as open educational resources (OER) under the most permissive copyright license (CC BY) and to John Mark Keyes and Peter Pagano who revised the materials. For information about the OER go to the Commonwealth of Learning.

These open courses will be of value to all those who wish to improve their knowledge of legislation and their skills in preparing laws of all types. Through online forums the courses also invite discussion of legislative drafting as it is practiced in different jurisdictions.

In order to obtain a diploma, students must enrol in the credit courses at Athabasca University and submit drafting projects for assessment by Instructors who are experienced legislative counsel drawn from a variety of Commonwealth jurisdictions.