Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
It is to state the obvious that the internet has significantly altered how we obtain and use information and products. In the past, we would spend a Saturday morning driving to a market to pick up groceries, stopping by a bookstore for a weekend read, and picking up a newspaper at a convenience store. Now, with a few clicks, we can have our groceries delivered, download an e-book, and read the newspaper online, all from the comfort of our sofa.
The Internet has also impacted the delivery of higher education. The initial online higher education market was dominated by for-profit institutions geared towards older, working adults. However, in recent years, brick-and-mortar institutions have entered the market, and students of all ages are pursuing degrees online. Perhaps most prominently, Arizona State University now has over 25,000 online students working towards undergraduate degrees ranging from information technology to electrical engineering; the majority of these students are under the age of thirty and over one- third of the students are under the age of twenty-five. Institutions of all calibers now offer online programs. A U.S. News and World Report ranking of the best online graduate nursing programs included Duke, Ohio State, and Johns Hopkins in the top five.
Further, the impact is noticeable not only in fully online degree programs, but also, and perhaps even more so, in the ubiquity of online courses at brick-and-mortar educational institutions. In the fall of 2014, approximately 2.8 million undergraduate students took at least one online course, with almost ninety percent of those students enrolled at public institutions and the remaining ten percent enrolled at not-for-profit private schools.
Legal education in the United States has been slow to embrace online education. But in recent years, the American Bar Association (ABA) has indicated that it is more willing to embrace online legal education. For example, the ABA increased the number of credits a student may take online from twelve to fifteen and removed the previous limit of four credits of online education per term. Further, the ABA gave provisional approval to William Mitchell College of Law, which shortly thereafter became Mitchell Hamline School of Law, to offer a “hybrid” J.D. degree option, which involves students studying online for most of the semester, but then spending an intensive week or more on campus. The school began offering the program in January 2015, and now other ABA approved institutions are considering and implementing similar hybrid programs that take advantage of online instruction.
While now common in higher education, this article seeks to answer the question of whether an online course can be an effective component of a law school’s curriculum. This article will examine this question by looking back at a series of articles from 1999, The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Legal Education, and applying the principles proffered in these articles to online legal education. Moreover, this article uses this author’s experience developing and teaching online courses over the past ten years for examples and applications of these principles.
This article first explores the origin of the articles mentioned and examines their impact on legal education reform and scholarship. This article then introduces this author’s online courses, presents his organizational structure, and covers an overview of the instructional materials and assignments. The article is next divided into subsections, and addresses the principles for good practice. The majority of the analysis is included in the first three subsections and focuses on three principles that are the subject of significant scholarship in legal education: Principle 3 on active learning, Principle 2 on cooperative and group exercises, and Principle 4 on prompt feedback, with a primary concentration on formative assessment.
At the outset, a few items should be noted. To begin, this article focuses solely on asynchronous and not synchronous, online courses that are part of an ABA approved law school curriculum. Synchronous learning requires students and teachers to be online at the same time because the learning activities happen at set times, while asynchronous classes give students a time frame to complete the learning activities on their own. While some of the discussion may be useful as applied to a synchronous online course, the course development and pedagogy of an asynchronous course differs significantly. Additionally, the article assumes that the course is being taken by a student who has had the typical first year in-class law school experience rather than a student who is taking an entire legal education program online. Finally, the article necessarily slips in and out of first and third person because much of the discussion and analysis bounces back and forth with this author’s own experiences and courses.