Graduate Diploma – Legislative Drafting - Open access courses and webinars

Two decades of development of distance education for legislative counsel have 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 free online non-credit courses in legislative drafting. These take the form of open courseware (OCW), which contains all of the study materials in AU's diploma program, including interactive online drafting exercises. Please access the materials at: Legislative Drafting - Commonwealth of Learning

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 more information, 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.

To obtain a diploma, students must enrol in credit courses at Athabasca University and submit drafting projects for assessment by experienced legislative counsel from a variety of Commonwealth jurisdictions.